The World Health Organization wants them to be regulated more strongly.
Governments should ban the use of electronic cigarettes indoors and in public places and outlaw tactics to lure young users, the World Health Organization said in a report released on Tuesday. It also raised concerns about the role of big tobacco companies in the fast-growing market.
Considering the numerous uncertainties surrounding e-cigarettes, which have been on the market for less than a decade, the United Nations organization said it was appropriate to prohibit their use indoors “until exhaled vapour is proven to be not harmful to bystanders.”
It also called for regulation to ensure the products contain a standard dose of nicotine, as the drug content now varies widely between manufacturers. And to stop children from picking up the habit, it said that e-cigarette sales to minors should be banned and that fruity, candy-type flavorings should be prohibited.
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Electronic nicotine delivery systems “are the subject of a public health dispute among bona fide tobacco-control advocates that has become more divisive as their use has increased,” the report notes. Some experts embrace them as a means of reducing the harm associated with traditional cigarettes while others view them as a threat to the progress that has been made in “denormalizing” the use of tobacco.
Proponents of e-cigarettes argue that they are safer than tobacco, because they do not contain the carcinogens found in tar and other tobacco components. Anecdotal evidence suggests e-cigarettes may hold promise as smoking cessation aids, too. But the World Health Organization report noted that there is scant evidence for their effectiveness in helping smokers give up the habit; the only randomized trial to date to have compared e-cigarettes with nicotine patches “showed similar, although low, efficacy for quitting smoking.”
The organization said e-cigarette advertisers should be prohibited from making any health claims, including on the product’s purported value as a smoking cessation aid, “until manufacturers provide convincing supporting scientific evidence and obtain regulatory approval.”
The report is here. I’ve been following this stuff because while some municipalities are treating e-cigarettes like traditional tobacco products, others like Houston have made no move to amend their existing anti-smoking ordinances. Some jails in Texas are allowing the use of e-cigarettes on the less-harmful-than-tobacco theory, while others aren’t. It’s a coming public debate, and as things stand right now there’s a lack of information about their effects. A lot of entities are waiting to hear more from organizations like the WHO and the Surgeon General.
Also in the news: adolescents who use e-cigarettes are much more likely to try tobacco, according to the CDC.
The morass of conflicting information about e-cigarettes and tobacco use grew deeper Monday, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new study showing that adolescents who vape say they are much more likely to smoke conventional cigarettes.
The results show that 43.9 percent of sixth- through 12th-graders who had used e-cigarettes said they intended to light up conventional cigarettes over the next year, compared with 21.5 percent of youth who had never used the electronic nicotine delivery systems.
Overall, more than 263,000 adolescents who had never smoked before used e-cigarettes in 2013, up from 79,000 in 2011, the CDC reported in a study in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research. The data come from the agency’s National Youth Tobacco Surveys for 2011-2013.
The study also showed that 21.9 percent of the youth who had never smoked traditional cigarettes intended to give them a try in the next year — almost exactly the same proportion as the 21.5 percent who had never tried an e-cigarette — and that, overall, the percentage of youths who reported an intention to smoke declined “significantly” in the 2013 survey.
We all know that smoking is terrible for you, but we don’t yet know how much, or even if, e-cigarettes are “better” than tobacco. If there is a correlation between vaping and smoking among teenagers, that’s a pretty strong piece of evidence that they’re not any better.