Tobacco/nicotine use falls to 25-year low among teenagers

Tobacco/nicotine use falls to 25-year low among teenagers
E-cigarette, which is much less harmful to your health than a regular cigarette.

Only  8% of U.S. teens report using tobacco or nicotine products — the lowest rate since 1999, according to data released on October 17 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This debunks fears that tobacco/nicotine use would rise due to the popularity of products like flavored e-cigarettes among kids.

Rates of use are similar for both male and female students, but males are more likely to use multiple kinds of tobacco products. As Axios reports,

  • E-cigarettes were the most commonly reported tobacco product currently used (5.9%). That was followed by nicotine pouches (1.8%), cigarettes (1.4%), cigars (1.2%) and smokeless tobacco (1.2%).
  • Current use of any combustible tobacco product was reported by 6.3% of American Indian/Alaska Native adolescents, followed by 4.1% Black, 3.9% of multiracial, 2.9% of Hispanic, and 2.4% of White teens.

These findings “from the National Youth Tobacco Survey showed the effects of a big drop-off in e-cigarette use among high schoolers, which hit the lowest mark ever measured by the survey.”

Surveys like this wrongly lump together smoking — which causes cancer — and nicotine products that don’t emit smoke — such as electronic cigarettes, which emit vapor that is much safer to inhale than tobacco smoke is. Vaping is much less dangerous than smoking.

As Reason Magazine notes,

Nicotine is the substance in cigarettes that makes them physically addictive. But nicotine itself isn’t what makes cigarettes so dangerous. (Some scientists “wonder if a daily dose could be as benign as the caffeine many of us get from a morning coffee,” notes Scientific American.) It’s the other ingredients in cigarettes, and the byproducts of combustion, that make smoking cigarettes so bad for you….In a world with lower-nicotine cigarettes, people already addicted to nicotine will still be addicted—they’ll just have to smoke more cigarettes to get their nicotine fix. That means that mandating all U.S. cigarettes be low-nicotine cigarettes could actually make smoking riskier by requiring smokers to smoke more and consume more of the other substances in cigarettes in order to get the same level of nicotine they’re used to.

The FDA plans to eventually force cigarette manufacturers to reduce the amount of nicotine in each cigarette, which would leave cigarettes just as cancer-causing, but reduce their ability to satisfy people’s desire for nicotine. Filter magazine discusses the possibility that lowering nicotine levels could backfire by making smokers think that cigarettes are harmless if they contain less nicotine — even though they aren’t. It says the FDA’s “scaremongering has managed to convince many people that nicotine is the most harmful ingredient of a combustible cigarette, when nicotine does not cause significant harms.” As a result, “many smokers may understand the new products to be a government-approved green light to carry on smoking tobacco. This misguided understanding is liable to have deadly consequences.”

Meanwhile, notes Reason, “while authorities have gone all-in on low-nicotine cigarettes as a means to reduce smoking, they’ve repeatedly attacked a more sane way to do so: promoting vaping—which provides nicotine without the tar and combustion—as an alternative to smoking.”

Hans Bader

Hans Bader

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law. He also once worked in the Education Department. Hans writes for CNSNews.com and has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” Contact him at hfb138@yahoo.com

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