Blowing smoke up the gateway

A new study purporting to show that e-cigarettes ‘put youth on the road to traditional smokes’ has Australian public health activists calling for more regulation.

But does the study really show what the headlines claim?

The facts of the study are this: 700-odd teenagers and 20-somethings were surveyed twice, first in 2012–13 and then again a year later. In the first survey, 16 individuals admitted to having tried e-cigarettes. In the follow-up, 11 of those 16 had also tried real cigarettes.

Eleven out of 16 is a higher percentage of smokers than was found among the 97.7 percent of respondents who hadn’t tried e-cigs at the time of the first survey.

That doesn’t mean that having tried e-cigarettes made those 11 individuals more likely to take up smoking, though

It’s more likely that those people have certain character traits, like adventurousness or risk-taking, that precede and explain their consumption of both products.

Talk of a ‘gateway drug’ is overblown—especially when grounded in the actions of fewer than a dozen individuals.

Regardless, regulation of smokeless tobacco products should be based on their health effects, if any, and not on their possible influence on consumption of a completely different product.

Helen Andrews is a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies