Vaping: Worth the Collateral Damage?
Two recent articles published in Addictive Behaviors demonstrate the core ethical question we face right now related to nicotine vaping (I’ve included links to articles below).
One article found that adult smokers who started vaping were more likely to quit smoking entirely than those that did not.
The second article (a literature review, focused on the US Hispanic population) concluded that use by adults is rare, and that vaping initiation by adolescents who are not currently smokers is far more common.
They also noted:
"Hispanic adolescents who had experimented with e-cigarettes at baseline were 5.22 times more likely to be using e-cigarettes one year later, and 3.64 times more likely to be using both e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes, compared with their peers who had not tried e-cigarettes at baseline."
I think this represents the paradigm very succintly: in vapes we have a product that can have health benefits for a small minority of adult smokers who actually use them, but that has significant negative health implications for the very large number of teens and young adults who definitely are using it.
Which priority does our society value more? Or perhaps more accurately, whose voice is loudest at the federal level? Or perhaps most accurately, how long will the political donations from vaping companies and trade organizations carry them in Washington DC?
For better or for worse, we’ll find out.
Study 1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306460322001058
Study 2: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306460321003348