By Dr. Steven J. Allen ——Bio and Archives--September 15, 2016
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This article is part of the Green Watch series.
Summary: Bureaucrats and politicians often cite “science” as justification for their efforts to exercise control over Americans’ lives. It’s a fake, politicized “science,” of course. When science suggests that government policy is ineffective or counterproductive, Washington elites ignore the science they claim to venerate. Case in point: the regulation of e-cigarettes, benefitting the big tobacco companies that the Left claims to hate. This reminds us of the “Joe Camel” controversy, which was fabricated and promoted so that the Left could get its hands on a fortune in tobacco money.
The Food and Drug Administration has joined with Big Tobacco in an effort to crush the small businesses that make up most of the e-cigarette industry. In doing so, the FDA is putting at risk the lives of millions of Americans.
The FDA’s actions will not improve our nation’s public health objectives. To the contrary, they will yank responsibly manufactured vapor products from the hands of adult smokers and replace them with the cigarettes they had been trying to give up. The FDA will kill nearly a decade of innovation in the vapor technology industry and the many thousands of small and mid-size businesses in communities across this country who have invested in establishing retail stores and developing new technologies that sit outside of the influence of Big Tobacco. If enforced as drafted, the unreasonable and excessive regulations proposed by the FDA will only serve to put these innovators out of business, their employees out of work, and will hand deliver Big Tobacco a monopoly on vapor products.At this writing, U.S. Reps. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) seek congressional approval for a measure to limit the most damaging part of the new FDA rules. The former Democratic National Chairman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, has worked to block their efforts.
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Actual cigarette smoking among teens, the kind that requires inhaling carcinogenic products of combustion, is down a startling 25 percent in one year and nearly 42 percent since 2011. The reason is the rapid substitution of vaping or e-cigarettes, which hold singular promise as a harm-reduction measure for those drawn to the nicotine habit. Great news, right? Not if you listen to Thomas Frieden of the Centers for Disease Control, who’s doing his best to disguise good tidings as bad so as to stoke the officially encouraged panic about vaping.Again, recall that the CDC’s mission is public health, which is the prevention of disease from communicable disease (bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens) and from common environmental sources. The agency is located in metropolitan Atlanta because, when the CDC’s precursor was founded in 1942, the South was where the malaria was. Other agencies handle environmental threats, so the proper role of the CDC (formerly the Communicable Disease Center) is to prevent communicable diseases. When the CDC involves itself in attempts to alter people’s behavior—matters of private health such as smoking, consumption of alcohol, and overeating, even such behaviors as how people drive and whether they keep guns at home—it is acting unethically and outside its proper scope, and ignoring its legitimate function. Frieden served infamously as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Under his leadership, city officials took over the writing of restaurant menus and expanded their role in dictating the foods that restaurants could serve. Now, as CDC director, Frieden is obsessed with e-cigs. Joe Nocera wrote in the New York Times:
In a conference call with reporters, Tom Frieden . . . couldn’t stop talking about how awful this was. “It’s important that everyone, parents and kids, understand that nicotine is dangerous for kids at any age, whether it’s an e-cigarette, hookah, cigarette or a cigar,” he said. In addition to being addictive, nicotine was thought to affect the still-maturing adolescent brain—although Frieden also acknowledged that this had mainly been shown in animal studies, rather than studies of adolescents. What’s more, he feared that there was a “significant likelihood that a proportion of those who are using e-cigarettes will go on to use combustible cigarettes.”Actually, e-cigs appear to be a strong deterrent to cigarette use, given the substitution effect. Vaping appears to be quickly replacing smoking among young people. By 2015, real smoking—the kind, as Nocera noted, “that kills one out of every two long-term smokers” —dropped to 9.2 percent among teens by 2015. That, Nocera wrote, was “the first time that teen smoking in America has ever hit single digits,” and
it seems pretty obvious that the decline in cigarette smoking has largely been caused by the rising popularity of e-cigarettes. This, too, was denied by Frieden. But as David Sweanor, a tobacco policy expert at the University of Ottawa, put it to me: “What other huge interventions have there been? It’s not like there has been a big new cigarette tax, or tough new package warnings. The only thing that is new is the introduction of e-cigarettes.”(Nocera is no right-winger, by the way. A former New York Times op-ed columnist, he once likened “Tea Party Republicans” to terrorists.) In National Review Online, Andrew Stuttaford noted that “the experience of snus, a form of moist tobacco popular in Sweden that is almost infinitely safer than cigarettes, would suggest that a safer substitute is more likely to be a gateway away from cigarettes than an introduction to them.” Some suggest that Frieden is in denial about e-cigs, that he is blinded to the benefits of e-cigs. “That’s not the case,” wrote Walter Olson.
Frieden is many things, but he is not a fool. What he is, however, is an absolutist, a moral crusader, pur et dur [pure and hard], who enjoys wielding the power that the nanny state has given him, and, of course, the opportunity to show his own (as he sees it) superior virtue. There can be no compromise with tobacco or even (in isolation, far safer) with nicotine, at least if the latter is associated with pleasure rather than the weaning process represented by patches or gum.CDC bureaucrats and CDC-connected politicians are especially bothered that e-cigarette advertising supposedly targets young people by focusing on themes of “independence, rebellion, and sex.” Sex is, of course, the most common theme in advertising, but it’s the “independence” and “rebellion” part that is most bothersome. Nothing offends Progressives like an appeal to the human need for freedom. Frieden has asserted repeatedly that e-cigarettes are addictive. In 2014, he claimed that “Many kids are starting out with e-cigarettes and then going on to smoke conventional cigarettes.” He said earlier this year that e-cigs “may well result in changes in the adolescent brain and increase the chances that a kid will smoke regular cigarettes and have to deal with the suffering and disability and cost that that causes for a lifetime.” The Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Guy Bentley asked the CDC for the evidence behind Frieden’s assertions, and the CDC cited two studies.
The first is a study on school students in LA showing those who use e-cigarettes are 2.7 times more likely to report using conventional tobacco over the next year. On the face of it, this seems pretty damning evidence. The only problem, or rather one of the several problems, is the study’s own authors say “we cannot conclude that e-cigarette use directly leads to smoking.” This is because the study had several major drawbacks that make it null and void when trying to draw a cause and effect relationship between vaping and smoking. “The study did not measure ‘e-cigarette use.’ It merely asked kids whether they had ‘ever’ tried an e-cigarette. Kids who had ever tried an e-cigarette, even a puff, were compared with all kids who had never even puffed on an e-cigarette,” Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, points out. “Kids who would not even try an e-cigarette, despite their popularity, represent a different population than kids who would try a puff on an e-cig,” according to Siegel. The research team doesn’t even record whether any of the subjects were regular vapers or had a nicotine addiction before they experimented with cigarettes. . . . Smoking is defined in the study as any use of a cigarette—even a single solitary puff. Critically, the research also fails to tell us how many people used a tobacco cigarette and then became regular smokers. The editorial that accompanied the study . . . [declared that] the current study cannot determine whether e-cigarette exposure was associated with [progressing to becoming regular smokers].” Clive Bates, a leading anti-smoking campaigner and former director of the United Kingdom’s Action on Smoking and Health, writing in August last year, agrees: “It is not possible to conclude that smoking is caused by prior e-cigarette use from this data (and the authors are clear about that) so no-one should be stating that this establishes a gateway or even hints at it.”Likewise, the second study failed to show what the CDC claimed it did. Bentley:
Using two questionnaires a year apart sent to 728 young people, . . . [the study found that] just 16 subjects tried an e-cigarette at the beginning of the process. One year on, six of the sixteen reported trying a cigarette. The study claims they progressed to “traditional cigarette smoking.” Nowhere in the study is it known whether these six are regular smokers or whether they have even had more than one puff of a cigarette. Nor did the study say whether the 16 who tried e-cigarettes were regular vapers or addicted to nicotine. But the researchers did deem it appropriate to classify people who had ever tried an e-cigarette as regular users.Another CDC fake-out involved the agency’s claim that overall tobacco use by middle and high school students has not changed since 2011. The CDC got to that result by classifying e-cigarettes, which contain no tobacco, as part of overall tobacco use. Seriously. Bentley again:
Vaping has surged among middle and high school students in recent years despite age restrictions and cigarette use has fallen markedly. “From 2011 through 2015, significant decreases in current cigarette smoking occurred among youth,” says the CDC. Between 2011-2015, cigarette use among high school students plummeted by more than a third from 15.8 percent to 9.3 percent. Instead of welcoming the fall in teen smoking, CDC’s director Tom Frieden focused on climbing e-cigarette use and falsely equated it with tobacco. “E-cigarettes are now the most commonly used tobacco product among youth, and use continues to climb,” said Frieden.Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, characterized the CDC claim as “staggeringly dishonest.” Part 2: E-cigs and Joe Camel: To the Washington elite, we’re all children
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Steven J. Allen, Senior Editor, Labor Watch and Green Watch
Dr. Allen covers labor union organizing and the environmental movement for Capital Research Center, CRC. He previously served as press secretary to U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton, as editor of Tea Party Review magazine, and as senior researcher for Newt Gingrich 2012. He has a master’s degree in political science from Jacksonville State University, a law degree from Cumberland Law School, and a PhD in Biodefense from the College of Science at George Mason University.