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3 VAPING LIES THE U.S. MEDIA CONTINUES TO TELL

All About the Invention of the E-Cig

We live in a world in which fake news proliferates and the media will peddle any story that will get attention, regardless of whether it happens to be true or not.

Of course, bad news sells much better than good news and so even potentially uplifting stories are imbued with negative twists.

In the United States, vaping has certainly received a rough deal from the media. Newspapers continue to publish lies and repetition of those lies ensures that they are believed.

Follow the Money

When it comes to the subject of vaping, telling the truth certainly isn't the U.S. media's strong suit.

There are several reasons for the complicated relationship between the U.S. media and the vaping industry. One of the most prominent of these being the teen vaping epidemic.

The teen vaping epidemic has created a strong undercurrent against vaping among non-smoking U.S. parents. The media - always desperate for clicks and shares - has played on that by using vaping-related headlines to inspire panic.

In addition, it hasn't helped that some of the most powerful individuals in the media - such as billionaire Michael Bloomberg - are decidedly against vaping and would prefer to see it banned entirely.

Bloomberg also funds the tobacco control arm of the World Health Organisation, thus giving worldwide amplification to his anti-vaping rhetoric.

The problem with the media bias against vaping is that the U.S. is the pipeline through which much of the world's news flows. If you get your news from an aggregator like Google News, you're going to see a highly U.S.-centric point of view.

When our own government needs to publish a press release correcting misconceptions about vaping that the U.S. media has helped to create, that's a real problem.

With all this in mind, whenever you see a news headline about vaping that's spiked with alarm and clearly designed to bait you into clicking, you should read it with a healthy dose of scepticism.

Who is funding that headline? Who would benefit if you were swayed by the views presented? It's always wise to follow the money. 

Vaping Lie 1: Vaping Isn't Safer Than Smoking and Can Cause Severe Lung Disease

In 2019, people across the United States begin exhibiting symptoms of a debilitating lung illness. In all, more than 2,7000 cases were identified. Dozens of victims died.

The only commonality between patients was that they had all used vaping products before contracting the illness.

The term EVALI (E-Cigarette or Vaping Product Use Associated Lung Injury) was quickly evolved for the condition. This resulted in a sense of panic about youth vaping.

But the sensationalised stories often omitted to mention that the vapers concerned had been vaping unregulated cannabis products.

The EVALI outbreak was finally traced back to Vitamin E acetate, a substance added to black-market vape cartridges containing extracted liquid THC. It made the cartridges look more potent than they actually were.

From the beginning, it should have been obvious to most observers that nicotine e-liquid couldn't be the cause of EVALI. The illness occurred almost exclusively in the United States, but U.S.-made e-liquid is distributed throughout the world. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration froze the e-liquid industry in 2016, making it illegal to release new vape juice products without first going through a lengthy approval process.

EVALI, however, didn't appear until 2019. Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb immediately recognised that illegal THC-based vaping products were the only logical cause of the illness, and the research that followed bore that out.

The lie that legal nicotine e-cigarettes could have caused EVALI has exhibited serious staying power.

In a survey of 2,200 U.S. adults conducted early in 2020, only 28% of respondents correctly identified THC vapes as the cause of EVALI, and we have lazy and irresponsible reporting to thank for the fact that this vaping lie still persists today.

A Google search for URLs including the terms "vaping" and "lung disease" but not "cannabis" - and restricted to articles published in the past 30 days - turns up page after page of results, and some of those results are truly shocking. In fact, new articles incorrectly blaming nicotine e-liquid for EVALI are still published almost every day.

Vaping Lie 2: We Don't Know What's in E-Cigarette Vapour

 

One of the common lies that you'll read about vaping in the U.S. media is the idea that we don't know what e-cigarettes contain. Some people even go so far as to claim that vaping isn't regulated by the government and that e-liquids have no labelling standards. Both of those statements are completely false.

In the U.S., the FDA issued its regulations for vaping products on May 10, 2016. Compliance deadlines for various aspects of the regulations have been staggered through the years since, with the final deadline for compliance with all regulations finally arriving on September 9, 2020.

The deadline for all e-liquid makers to submit their ingredient listings to the FDA was November 8, 2018. The vast majority of e-liquid companies started printing ingredient lists on their labels long before then.

 Here in the U.K., we actually go a step further because the TRPR requires e-liquid companies to perform emissions tests on their products before bringing them to the market. So, we don't just know what's in the e-liquid; we also know about any other compounds produced when the e-liquid is used.

In testing, e-liquid makers are required to test their products for emissions of acetaldehyde, acrolein and formaldehyde. Hardware makers must test the vapour emissions for aluminium, chromium, iron, nickel and tin.

Manufacturers of both hardware and e-liquid need to test for diethylene glycol, ethylene glycol, diacetyl, pentane 2,3 dione and tobacco-specific nitrosamines. The truth, then, is that we actually know far more about what e-cigarettes contain than we do about what's in tobacco cigarettes.

Vaping Lie 3: There Is No Evidence That Vaping Can Help You Quit Smoking

The purpose of e-cigarettes has always been to give adult smokers an alternative method of nicotine consumption that's more satisfying than traditional nicotine therapy and that more closely mimics the act of smoking.

As e-cigarettes became more widely available around the world, millions of smokers switched to vaping and found that they were indeed able to quit smoking successfully. 

Despite the growing mountain of anecdotal evidence, many medical professionals in the United States were hesitant to recommend vaping as a means of helping smokers quit - and even as the anecdotal evidence turned to clinical evidence, many refused to backtrack on their misinformed opinions.

Is there any hard evidence that switching to vaping can help you quit smoking? As a matter of fact, there is. If you commit to switching completely to vaping and not vaping and smoking concurrently, your chance of quitting successfully is excellent. If you receive counselling, your chance improves even more.

In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in which 886 people who requested smoking cessation help from the U.K. National Health Service were randomly given either a refillable vaping system and free e-liquid or a three-month supply of traditional nicotine replacement
products. All participants also received face-to-face counselling services. After one year, 9.9 percent of those who used traditional nicotine replacement products had quit smoking successfully, while 18 percent of those who used e-cigarettes had quit.

Double Standards

When it comes to smoking cessation, many health experts apply a strange double standard to vaping. In studies not funded by pharmaceutical companies, the success rate of traditional nicotine replacement
products in helping smokers quit for one year is only around 8-10 percent at best, depending on the study.

Health experts see those statistics - which are actually pretty dismal - and they say that nicotine replacement is "effective" even though the vast majority of those who use nicotine replacement products do not quit smoking.

When those same people claim that we don't know if e-cigarettes are effective in helping people quit, it makes no sense - until you begin to examine the backgrounds of those people. Those who would say that e-cigarettes can't help you quit often have a strong financial incentive to encourage you to choose Big Pharma's smoking cessation products instead. Likewise, insurance companies almost universally discourage people from using e-cigarettes for smoking cessation because they have no financial
stake in the sale of vaping products.

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