An attack of the vapers. Credit: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty
A shocking statistic. Between them, in the last month or so, smoking tobacco and smoking e-cigarettes probably killed about 40,006 people.
Of course, it wasn’t precisely 50/50. Smoking killed about 40,000 of them; the other six were caused by vaping.
In the average month, about 40,000 people are killed by smoking in the USA, according to the US Centres for Disease Control. Smokers die of “cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis”.
Meanwhile, there has been a huge surge of public interest in the risks of vaping after six much-publicised deaths in August and September. It’s no surprise, then, that the Trump administration is keen to crack down on the e-cigarette scourge, and public health officials are warning of the dangers of vaping.
I am being very slightly unfair here. The six deaths (and the 450 or so severe cases of lung disease) which are being blamed on vaping are apparently sudden acute illness caused by a single dose or small number of doses; the many, many thousands of deaths caused by actual tobacco-smoking are usually chronic illness caused by years of smoking. But still, in terms of the cost of years of life lost, the illnesses and pain and disability, and the burden on healthcare systems, there is absolutely no comparison.
Bizarrely, though, we treat vaping as somehow the same as actual smoking. The signs on train platforms say things like “no smoking, including e-cigarettes”. A constant drip-drip-drip of stories reporting ambiguous findings in mice or in petri dishes has caused undue concern. A survey last year by ASH, the anti-smoking charity, found that while in 2013 only 7% of people thought vaping was as bad as smoking, by the time of the survey, 26% did, and only 13% believed, correctly, that smoking is much more harmful. Another study in the journal Addiction found about the same – that roughly 22% thought vaping was as bad as smoking, and about 3% thought (!) that it is worse.
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SubscribePersonal experience here; mine and what I’ve observed: vaping replaces tobacco in habitual smokers as well as in potential smokers. That’s a huge benefit to society. In my particular case, vaping has given me my lungs back, and I recently completed my first half-marathon at age 54. I could not have done that as a smoker. And I could not have not been a non-smoker without the alternative of vaping.
Thank you for highlighting this important subject. I’ve lost count of the number of friends of mine who have swapped cigarettes for vaping, and pretty much all of them seem or claim to feel far healthier. It’s correct to point out that vaping isn’t good for you; but on the evidence so far it certainly seems hugely less unhealthy, and to lump it in with smoking is ridiculous, unnecessary and potentially dangerous if it discourages smokers from making the switch. For starters vaping doesn’t make your clothes or breathe stink, nor does it leave a room with the same stale stench smoking does.