It’s Official: Vaping is NOT a Gateway to Smoking Among Young People

Yet Another Vaping Myth Busted – This Time By Scientists

Any day you Google "vaping," you can bet that unsubstantiated tabloid articles about how vaping encourages more young people to smoke cigarettes will show up high on the list of results.

The vaping community is extremely dissatisfied with the media's negative coverage of e-cigarettes and strongly believes that, if vaping is a gateway to anything, it is OUT of smoking and ought to be widely promoted as a tool for quitting smoking.

Because of this, we are pleased to see new research from University College London that has been published in the highly regarded New Scientist magazine and largely refutes the idea that e-cigarettes are creating a nation of young people addicted to nicotine. Vaping does not appear to be a gateway to smoking tobacco, according to a recent analysis of trends in cigarette and e-cigarette use among 16- to 24-year-olds in England. This conclusion is made quite emphatically.

Is It Genetic? Or Peer Pressure?

Even though the new report acknowledges that studies have shown that teens who use vape mod kits are more likely to smoke, this does not prove that the first behavior is the cause of the second. Professor Lion Shahab of UCL, who authored the report, stated: This association might be explained by a vulnerability that is shared by all. That could be due, for instance, to a genetic predisposition to try new things or to the pressure from the environment to do so.

The previous studies, according to the report, had focused on individual behavior rather than population behavior. In their review, Prof Shahab's group took a gander at how the pace of smoking in 16 to 24-year-olds in general has changed throughout recent years as vaping developed more well known. In order for there to be a "gateway effect," the researchers would have anticipated that as vaping rates changed, so would smoking rates.

In 2013, vaping reached 5% of this age group, and it has remained at this level ever since. However, for the same demographic, regular smoking rates decreased from about 30% in 2013 to 25% in 2018 (the final year of the study).

Or Is It The Nicotine The Kids Want?

One of the primary contentions against facilitating the principles on the offer of e-cigarettes is that it will get youngsters snared on nicotine, provoking them to change to customary cigarettes for a quick nicotine hit. However, the World Vapers' Alliance's Scientific Advisor and University of Graz toxicologist, Professor Bernd Mayer, states that "the effect [of nicotine] as a nerve poison... only occurs in the event of a massive overdose, which is not achieved with inhalation."

Without any tobacco smoke, the potential for dependence on nicotine is exceptionally low, so most vapers feel substantially less habit-forming tension than smokers. " Furthermore, "smokers do not die from their nicotine addiction but from the harmful effects of the ingredients in tobacco smoke," adds Mayer.

In addition, data from a 2021 Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) UK report appear to refute the claim that vaping would en masse introduce nonsmoking young people to smoking. In their report Profile of 16/17 Year Old Smokers Debris viewed that as "Ordinary utilization of e-cigarettes by 16/17-year-olds stays unprecedented. In the 2020 survey, only 2.1% of respondents in this age group used e-cigarettes every day and less than a fifth (17.1%) had tried one.

So the media pattern for outlining e-cigarettes as a door to smoking doesn't face investigation. The fact that there is no correlation between the rising number of vapers and the number of smokers only serves to demonstrate that vaping is not a deceitful strategy to mislead our youth but rather an important innovation that can assist smokers in quitting.