Luckily, though, such reactions almost always concern matters about which your typical progressive is perfectly relaxed, and so a simple solution is at hand. To avoid the stress, why not simply shift your political stance to be more forward-thinking and chill out? Or, better yet, only freak out about real things: like Donald Trump being a fascist, or how white supremacy is being covertly propped up in British universities; or the rise of this dangerous new antifeminist influencer called a “femcel”. Granted, the sensations of anxiety and fury may be indistinguishable from earlier versions, but at least you will have the consolation of knowing that they spring from encounters with fearlessly honest, trustworthy reporting.

It is now more than 50 years since the academic Stanley Cohen popularised the phrase “moral panic” to describe scandalised media and public reactions to Mods and Rockers fighting on South Coast beaches, and the concept is as popular as ever. A branch of sociology — “moral panic studies” — is devoted to it. And there are disciplines where the mere mention of one in the title of your paper would seem to guarantee publication: moral panics about pornography, trans-identified males in sport, immigration rates, predatory academic publishing outfits, knife crime or whatever it is that great minds currently want you to think is Completely Fine, Actually.

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The classic features of a moral panic, according to those professionally invested in their existence, would include the exhibition of widespread hostility towards a particular kind of person: someone who counts as an outsider in relation to the status quo. There must also be “volatility”, in that public sentiment against such people must seem to have arisen relatively suddenly, probably as a result of Right-wing media exaggerations. And it is important that the hostility displayed be “disproportionate” relative to the threat posed; a feature with the pleasing side effect of allowing dorky lecturers to feel like urbane sophisticates as they sneer at Outraged-of-Tunbridge-Wells or Belligerent-of-Blackpool, assuming them to be in the grip of narrow-minded bigotry and quite possibly Victorian levels of sexual repression too.

But some things have changed in the moral panic discourse over the years. Cohen’s original formulation of an accompanying “folk devil” for every moral panic — a scapegoat for hidebound reactionaries and emotionally labile plebs to fixate upon — seems to have since been loosened, so that moral panics are now detected in reactions to impersonal things such as smartphone use and vaping, as well as in responses to particular kinds of people. And some of the traditional subjects of panics of yesteryear, once smirked at by hippies who considered themselves too cool for such uptight judgements, are now badged by progressives as genuinely problematic after all: the risks posed by alcohol, for instance, or the dangers posed by white working-class men.

There have been other changes too. In the Seventies and Eighties, a moral panic tended to be construed by its principal theorists as inevitably a bad thing, demonising the underdog in order to consolidate hegemonic Establishment power. Or, as one set of scholars puts it, introducing a journal issue on the topic: “Moral panic theorists have long recognised … moral panics as attempts to hold together a collective order that is permanently proclaiming its own demise in the face of the ‘barbarians at the gates’.” But equally, over the years, eagle-eyed theorists began noticing that progressive and Left-wing interest groups could be prone to the odd bit of volatile, widespread, and disproportionate fear-mongering too.

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True to self-interested form, though, this observation didn’t lead to scepticism about the whole idea, but to a new stream of journal articles, ponderously discussing whether there could be “good” panics as well as bad. Cohen thought that the ends sometimes justified the means, writing in the introduction to the Third Edition of his book that his own “cultural politics” meant positively “encouraging something like moral panics about mass atrocities and political suffering” in order to raise awareness. He went on: “Perhaps we could purposely recreate the conditions that made the Mods and Rockers panic so successful… and thereby overcome the barriers of denial, passivity and indifference that prevent a full acknowledgement of human cruelty and suffering.” It is almost as if he were setting out a truth-indifferent, histrionic template for progressive media, that many outlets have followed to the letter ever since.

A more accurate conclusion would have been that, whether or not it started out that way, the theoretical apparatus surrounding the concept of a moral panic soon became skewed towards protecting an aggressively individualistic variety of Left-liberalism, typically beloved of university academics but hated by those who have to live with its material effects on the ground. In practice, the concept has often been used to attack entities and social structures that stand in the way of these vested interests: close-knit communities (cue sneering at “moral panics” about unchecked immigration or crime rates); stable family relationships (see the casual dismissal of concerns about pornography; surrogacy; prostitution; absent fathers; divorce rates); and a conception of childhood and adolescence as desirably free from market-friendly adultification (marvel as they ridicule fears about the premature sexualisation of minors; medical procedures on trans-identified teenagers; child safety online). Supposedly detached observers may well characterise public resentment of these things as “volatile”, arising suddenly out of “nowhere” as a result of being whipped up by conservative media sources, but this only further underlines their relative cluelessness about how the other half is living.

In truth, whenever some newspaper or journal article contains the dreaded two words in its title, there is a strong chance that some fairly obvious and credible concern is being brushed aside; and that anyone who might have that particular concern is being atrociously caricatured pour encourager les autres. And another condescending aspect of the moral panic discourse is that the adjective “moral” is effectively treated as an intensifier of the pejorative “panic”: you might think panics are bad, but wait till you see a moral one! Once again, we make contact with an essentially adolescent attitude to taking a moral stand, as if the cool people wouldn’t be caught dead doing so.

But actually, identifying something as a moral panic inevitably involves getting into the weeds of moral judgement yourself, however you might pretend otherwise; for what else could you be saying than that some perceived problem is not in fact as important as it seems to others, and that their negative emotional responses to it are disproportionate and harmful? Every step of this involves ethical deliberation, evaluation, and ranking.

Of course, the detector of so-called moral panics might well be wrong in his assessments about significance and proportionately; maybe, in fact, he is not panicking enough about some state of affairs, letting major harms slide, to which he ought to be attending. Yet the thought doesn’t seem to enter the heads of those who like to wield the concept very often. One sign of this is that theorists of moral panics rarely offer extended arguments for their implicit judgements on the supposedly benign nature of whatever-it-is they are dismissing, relying instead on the assumption that their readers, similarly steeped in all the biases of a university education, will share them.

No one group, be it populist or technocratic, should be treated as infallible or impartial  in their assessments of social harms; and both Left- and Right-wing media platforms can distort, exaggerate, and monetise partisan outrage to awful effect. But contrary to their reputation, moral panics are not the exclusive domain of the Right; nor are they always — or even often — thoroughly misdirected. And nor do they especially bolster elite and Establishment interests; though the contemptuous progressive discourse about them just might.

Every few months a celebrity is papped with a cigarette, and lifestyle columns declare that we are living through a dangerous vibe shift — that this will be the generation which finally revives one of the most surefire ways to off yourself. But these latest viral moments simply represent another passing hiccup in an unstoppable project to stub the habit out entirely. The new smoking ban, which will prevent those born in or after 2009 from ever buying cigarettes, will ensure that in 20 years, smoking will just be something quaintly associated with Dot Cotton or Krusty the Clown, an anachronistic curiosity like a monocle or a pocket watch.

Charli XCX is 32, and Charley Hull is 28. In Bishop’s Stortford and Kettering respectively, their classmates would have smoked, not vaped, behind the bike sheds — a dying breed. But surely, you splutter, cigarettes are still cooler than Elf Bars? Well, yes. In the panopticon of Gen Z life, peering at one another through the fabricating prism of social media, being an “icon” is about carefully orchestrating optical illusions, gesturing towards passing “aesthetics”. Cigarettes are, according to internet people who never go outside, “iconic”. Charli’s apparent obsession with cocaine — “bumpin’” her way through her early thirties — is precisely the same as her brand’s fixation with smoking: 100% vibes-based, and curated to be just another feature of “brat”. It is all, of course, meaningless — and whether fans have ever seen cocaine in real life is irrelevant. Smoking, coke, negroni spagliatos: these are the modern-day equivalents of carnations, pearls or a tome in an Early Modern portrait. Whether they are truly used or owned by the sitter is beside the point: they simply gesture towards coveted attributes (betrothal, chastity, learnedness respectively) and so function as pure abstractions, symbols.

Gen Z will only ever see smoking in this light: as a symbol of rebellion, of thinness, of stress, of whatever they like. The thousand interpretations of this humble habit owe themselves to a few smoking-motif-obsessed filmmakers, including David Lynch — who last week revealed he had not left the house in two years over concerns about contracting Covid, having ravaged his emphysema-ridden lungs over a long career measured in glowing American Spirits. Nevertheless, the damage is done: the cigarette is so irrevocably a cinematic totem — standing in variously for a gun, a penis, a poison, a panacea — that nobody can now start smoking without feeling the weight of a century of associations. And as it becomes more verboten, more dangerous, the symbolism of the cigarette grows more and more unbearably self-referential.

For new Gen Z smokers, being “iconic” is the habit’s only social appeal — and it is entirely offset by other ideological neuroses. This is a generation which is so bound by the strictures of self-censorship, so boggled by the conventions of social media, that they have begun to use the term “unalived” instead of “killed” in general conversation. They are wimps, and looking cool (the only incentive for anybody ever to have picked up their first cigarette) cannot survive this.

Besides, is vice itself cool anymore? Once, substances were era-defining. From the birth of counterculture, each decade had their corresponding drug: the Sixties has its slow insanity, its hierarchy-smashing lassitude, the wonder-filled inertia of acid and marijuana. The Seventies has its bleak heroin, its fall from innocence, a decade of dark. The Eighties was all manic extravagance, cocaine to a T. On the dubiously sticky floors of Studio 54, the fast-paced, high-cost, high-speed shit chatting of coke crystallised that era’s gaudy hedonism. The Nineties had its euphoric, crashing manias, its acid house, its MDMA. After that, house parties dabbled in micro-trends — the bath salts, the ket, the NOS — but youth culture in general had by now stabilised, fuelled by immortal alcohol and a cocktail of other things that had all come before, becoming smugly ironic. All the while, smoking limped on, a sulky vampire in the corner of every sweaty student bedroom.

Vapes have blown all of this clean out of the water. During Covid, sprawled on Power Rangers bedspreads or being stared at by ancient posters of long-gone boy bands, students who should by rights have been frying their brains in nightclubs began to dream of other possible lives. Another vision of young adulthood began to curl into shape on their TikTok feeds: one in which you might declare yourself, with a straight face, “sober curious”. I recall how, in the first tentative gatherings post pandemic, it became immediately clear that these new habits had already set in: erstwhile “legends” were now “Bristol sober” (just doing ketamine); soon-to-be ex-friends were doing dry January (zealots). Being sober at uni changed, when I was there, from totally verboten to semi-acceptable, even admirable. Club culture began to fizzle out — and with it, the vomit-swallowing teenager trying to remember which way to light a Marlboro Gold.

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This shift has brought with it a sense that actually, smoking might be unappealing. Not just vibes-wise, but sensually: “I feel like I can taste their bronchitis”, says one friend, who dislikes kissing smokers (but is known to pilfer rollies himself). There is a recognition that cigarettes may not only kill you slowly in the future (they are the largest single cause of cancer in the UK) but may usher in a kind of social death — may make your clothes honk, turn your fingers yellow, fragrance your breath with eau de ashtray.

The old guard have become indignant outcasts — like in that IT Crowd sketch, aired two months after the original smoking ban came in, where Jen must brave a literal Siberia outside her office alongside the other addicts; Russian accents through chattering teeth. The image of vapes, conversely, is entirely different and wonderfully new: they are marketed as consequence-free, fresh and fruity solutions sailing straight out of techland. You can buy one fairly cheaply without knowing how to roll or having to buy a lighter, papers and filters, all the while anxiously hiding the smell from your parents. And you don’t have to like the admittedly challenging taste of burning leaves to claim camaraderie with other smokers, or for a reason to leave a dancefloor. So perfectly executed was the e-cig takeover that the number of vapoteurs has now hit an all-time high.

The minor smoking revival that we’re seeing now is simply a last bronchial gasp. Cigarettes have become subsumed in clouds of various half-hearted “aesthetics” — Anthony Bourdain sitting at a European cafe table wearing little black sunglasses; Kate Moss; ghosts from Tumblrs past. Gone is the Marlboro Man, swashbuckling his way around the West in a 10-gallon hat. For Gen Z have other options: they can vape, use the lisp-inducing abomination that is Zyn, or smugly abstain in favour of other “hyperfixations”. Only this generation could swap cigs for “journalling”.

And why shouldn’t they? Many of them have grown up around wrinkled, spluttering adults who were once slick, young smokers. I will not forget meeting a dying great aunt, Marlene, who the family called Auntie Marlboro, sparking up in her old people’s home between liquidy-lunged coughs. I was about 15, and I remember crying in front of her (she, fag in hand, was unfazed). It did not kill her in the end — on the contrary, it kept her sharp — but you couldn’t help but feel sorry for that yellowed woman in her yellowing, sunlit living room. That is, really, what smoking is about.

And yet, the evil of cigarettes has not been fully extinguished. Which is why the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak is proposing that those in their late teens should become the last generation ever to smoke legally in this country. Policy to be announced this week in the King’s Speech will eradicate tobacco from our society as surely and comprehensively as cannabis and cocaine have been.

None of this is particularly new, of course. Official disapproval of smoking goes back as far as James I’s 1604 pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco, though it took another three centuries for the government to get fully involved. The spur then was the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, which saw a flood of recruits to the colours, young men who were employed as servants, shopworkers, clerks and labourers. But if working-class patriotism was in fine fettle, the same could not be said of working-class health. Around three in 10 who applied to join the ranks were rejected on medical grounds. This worrying state of affairs, said some, was down to the advent of the cheap cigarette.

“The chief cause of unfitness was proved to be smoking,” declared Percy Everett, a magazine editor who later co-wrote Scouting for Boys with Boer War hero Robert Baden-Powell. The habit was responsible for “upwards of 80 diseases, including blindness and cancers of the lower lip and tongue, and is credited with killing 20,000 each year”. In short, it was “an evil which is sapping our boyhood’s strength, and so undermining our national manhood”. Smoking, like masturbation, was linked to blindness and insanity.

In response to such concerns came the Children’s Act of 1908, passed by H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, which introduced the first restrictions. It became illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone under the age of 16, and policemen and park keepers were authorised to confiscate tobacco, cigarettes and cigarette papers from underage smokers; they could also search boys for such items — though, for reasons of delicacy and decency, not girls.

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Adults, however, continued to smoke freely for six decades, until the evidence of the harm it caused became too great to ignore. The medical profession demanded a government intervention and in 1965 — when 70% of men and 40% of women smoked — television adverts for cigarettes were banned. (Other tobacco products fared better: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” ads were still being aired on TV into the Nineties.) The ensuing introduction, in 1971, of warnings on packets — “Smoking can damage your health” — wasn’t entirely successful. A 1975 poll showed that a third of smokers didn’t believe cigarettes could kill. The wording was accordingly ramped up, to include the word “seriously”.

There was also an effort to encourage switching to weaker cigarettes. A league table was published, showing the potency of the various brands. The implication was that if you were on Capstan Full Strength — which offered 38mg of tar per cigarette — you might be better off if you traded down. The Embassy Ultra Mild had just a tenth of those levels.

Advertising restrictions didn’t apply to sponsorship, though. Sport was a particularly attractive partner, since it enabled the brand-names and logos to be displayed on television. Snooker even offered the opportunity to see sportsmen light up while competing. There was also footballer John “Bionic” Osborne, a goalie for West Bromwich Albion, who was famously photographed having a quick smoke during a match in 1972, while the ball was down the other end.

Some, feeling that government action was painfully slow, took matters into their own hands. In 1971, the New Inn in Appletreewick, West Yorkshire declared itself Britain’s first no-smoking pub. It was reported that takings slumped. Later that year, a GP made the news when he refused to accept as patients a 45-year-old woman or her eight children because she had chronic bronchitis and wouldn’t give up smoking. She’d had a 15-a-day habit before the rejection; after, she claimed: “I have become so distraught that I now find I am getting through 30 cigarettes a day.”

Between government initiative and peer pressure, the number of smokers steadily fell, as did the number of places where one could indulge. The restrictions were not always popular, however. In 1982, British Rail banned smoking in the buffet cars of its Southern Region trains, but found itself overwhelmed by complaints and forced to back down. Two years later, smoking was prohibited on Tube trains in London, despite a survey showing only 18% of passengers in favour of a ban and 54% against. By then, only around a third of adults smoked.

It was around this time, though, that public attitudes really changed. Evidence for the negative effects of passive smoking began to accumulate, and there was no coming back from that. In the Nineties, diktats were issued from Brussels that radically reduced the maximum tar yield per cigarette — even as the Common Agricultural Policy was pumping millions into subsidising tobacco production. (An exception was made for Greece, which really liked a strong smoke, and negotiated an opt-out until 2006).

In response to this directive, the other John Osborne — the playwright, not the footballer — wrote a splendidly vitriolic letter to The Times, railing against those who had deprived him of his favourite Turkish cigarettes; “untipped, robust and fragrant”, they were “one of life’s few and reliable pleasures”. The restriction was “craven abasement” to “puny tyrannies”, to countries that had so recently been dictatorships. “As a schoolboy, I narrowly escaped from ‘European’ bombs on my doorstep,” wrote Osborne. “I can forgive this eagerness, but not the compounding of the insult by dashing the tobacco from my lips 40 years on.”

Those who objected to government action on smoking — and they tended, like Osborne, to be awkward individualists — insisted that this was a question of the liberty of the individual. The war against smoking was a “new Puritanism”, said Nicholas Ridley, Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary: “A crusade to stop others doing what they want or taking risks with their own lives.” (Ridley refused to give up smoking even when diagnosed with lung cancer.) And when David Simpson, formerly of Amnesty International, took over the anti-tobacco lobby group Action on Smoking and Health in 1979, journalist Bernard Levin spotted an irony: “Have all those years of admirable work on behalf of the oppressed and persecuted taught him nothing about the indivisibility of freedom?”

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Like our modern culture wars, the division has not been between Left and Right: over the years, Conservative, Labour and Liberal governments have all been on the same page about tobacco. Rather, it’s been between polite society — those who know they know better — and those who need to be protected from themselves. John Reid, health secretary in Tony Blair’s government, described the war against tobacco as “an obsession of the learned middle class”, and Diane Abbott saw it in similar terms in 2006: “Under New Labour, the party has gone from speaking for the white working class to speaking at them — whether about junk food or the smoking ban.”

There was some truth in this. The four-decade-long campaign had successfully reduced the number of smokers, but its impact was shaped by income and social class. Cigarettes had become unfashionable among the middle classes, but 42% of unskilled workers still smoked, as did 55% of single mothers. According to the Office for National Statistics, the imbalance remains: those with no educational qualifications are four times more likely to smoke than those with a degree.

Education, taxation and location having not been enough, there now comes a new policy to stub out smoking altogether. Sunak’s proposal is to raise the age at which one can purchase tobacco products by a year, every year, so that those now too young to smoke will forever be too young. It’s based on a similar law passed in New Zealand last year, and it will presumably pass through Parliament without much of a hitch — because in government, and in public opinion, the war has been comprehensively won. A taste for tobacco has become the love that dare not speak its name. Smokers are down to fewer than one in eight of the adult population. A YouGov poll last month showed a third of people supporting the proposed age-restriction; when you added in the 29% who wanted a complete ban immediately, it’s clear that Sunak has the public onside.

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Those who fear similar net-zero campaigns elsewhere — against alcohol, the wrong foodstuffs, cars, fireworks, whatever — might note with concern the pattern of public response to every step of the anti-smoking pathway. First, complaints, then ridicule, swiftly followed by compliance and acceptance. It took a while, but there was no rebellion. That studio laughter on Yes, Prime Minister is the sound of a different world.

Admittedly, the suppression of tobacco was greatly aided by an increased understanding of secondary smoking, but once the principle of prohibition is established, it becomes easier to administer. There’s no known secondary harm from vaping, for example, but restrictions have still been imposed by the Conservative government, and there will be more to come. In particular, there are objections to flavoured vapes, since these are assumed to be more attractive to children.

That’s not new, either. The same thinking was seen in the European directive that banned menthol-flavoured cigarettes — though its most notable objector was not a child, but Helmut Schmidt, the venerable ex-chancellor of West Germany. As well as being possibly the last major European statesman to carry a snuff-box, Schmidt was a chain-smoker, and it was reported that he bought up a stash of 38,000 mint-flavoured fags, which proved sufficient to see him through to his last puff. It’s not clear whether he bought enough. He died just shy of his 98th birthday.

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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For the record: it is not. Public Health England suggests that e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than real cigarettes. Cancer Research UK and NICE both agree. That’s not to say they’re harmless – they’re probably not. But then almost nothing is, hence all the slightly daft stories about burnt toast causing cancer. So far there is little to no reason to think that vaping significantly raises your risk of long-term chronic illness, and no reason whatsoever to think that if they do, the risk is remotely comparable to the risk of smoking. There is also no good evidence, that I’m aware of, that vaping acts as a “gateway” to real smoking.

But still – those deaths, right? Isn’t it worth worrying about them?

Without wanting to minimise the suffering of the people involved and their families, not really. First, it’s worth being aware just how many people vape now. Somewhere around 9 million US adults do, according to the CDC, and about 5% of UK adults according to the ONS, which is probably around the 2.5 million mark. Six deaths in a population of 9 million is a death rate of 0.07 per 100,000 per year. For comparison, the average American’s annual odds of dying from falling off a ladder is about 0.17 per 100,000 per year, if I’ve done my maths right. I do not think we need, at the moment, to ban ladder-climbing, although of course we should continue to monitor the situation.

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Second – and crucially – as I understand it, the people who have become ill and died were not actually smoking what most of us would consider an e-cigarette. They were, instead, using black market products which heated oil to vaporise cannabis products. Inhaling oil vapour can, apparently, cause something called lipoid pneumonia, which appears to be behind the deaths.

In the UK, under EU law, vape products have to use propylene glycol and glycerine as the carriers for the nicotine and flavourings, which does not cause lipoid pneumonia. You may be able to get the oil-based kind on the black market – I don’t know – but even if you can, it doesn’t seem very likely that cracking down on the legally available kind will stop people using the already illegal ones.

This stuff matters. There is good evidence that taking up vaping helps people quit smoking, according to CRUK and NICE. CRUK has in fact started a public information campaign to try to encourage people to do just that, because the health benefits are clear and obvious.

And yet people who should know better are making a fuss that could cost lives. The American Lung Association’s president issued a statement saying that e-cigarettes are “not safe” and that “no one should use e-cigarettes or any other tobacco product”. He added: “This message is even more urgent today following the increasing reports of vaping-related illnesses and deaths nationwide.”

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The Kansas state health officer said, “It is time to stop vaping… If you or a loved one is vaping, please stop … I’m extremely alarmed for the health and safety of Kansans who are using vaping products and urge them to stop until we can determine the cause of vaping related lung injuries and death.” Trump apparently wants to ban flavourings in vape products.

Let’s imagine that these people are successful in their project and manage to persuade some non-negligible number of people to stop vaping. Then imagine that some number of those people can’t easily stay off nicotine and end up returning permanently to tobacco products. Let’s say it’s a tiny percentage of the total vaping population; 0.1%, or around 9,000 people.

According to the CDC, smoking takes about 10 years off your life expectancy, on average. According to PHE, vaping is about 95% less harmful; let’s naively take that at face value and assume it takes about six months off your life, on average. So those 9,000 people will lose about 85,500 years of life between them, compared to if they’d stayed on the vape. Even if all six of the people who’ve died were 20 years old and healthy and expecting to live another 70 years each, that’s only 420 years of life lost.

So if even 0.1% of the vaping population returns to tobacco permanently, it is reasonable to expect it to be a public health disaster about 200 times worse than the vaping death “outbreak” that we’re seeing now. It won’t be so visible – the deaths will come slowly, in non-dramatic, boring ways, in older people dying in hospices of cancer and emphysema – but it will be just as terrible for each of the people and families involved, and there will be an awful lot more of them.

But still, do tell me about the risks of vaping again, I’m all ears.