E-cigarettes could lead to young people becoming hooked on smoking

Scimex: An Australian scientist argues that e-cigarettes could lead to young people becoming hooked on smoking, even though manufacturers say the small quantities of nicotine found in their products is harmless. E-cigs could reverse Australia's progress in stopping young people smoking, because the wide variety of available flavours is alluring to them, he says. If manufacturers of e-cigarettes are wrong about the harmless nature of the small amounts of nicotine in their products, millions of young people may be susceptible, just as the numbers of young people smoking are falling, says a public health expert published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

 Pr Simon Chapman, from the University of Sydney, wrote that the tobacco industry knows "how essential new cohorts of young smokers are to its very survival as an industry". "Today, [just] 12.8% of Australians aged 14 years and over smoke on a daily basis. The record low uptake of smoking by the young is most responsible for this", Professor Chapman wrote. "The prospect of the industry reversing this inexorably ruinous exodus has been given a major boost with the arrival of e-cigarettes (ECs)." Professor Chapman argued that although tobacco transnationals had invested in ECs, they had not stopped their efforts to "attack and dilute" tobacco control policies nor announced a phase-out of their combustible products. "From this, we can conclude that the companies' best hopes are for people to smoke and to use ECs or 'vape', not to use ECs instead of smoking", he wrote.
A 2013 survey found that 15.4% of Australian smokers aged 14 years or over had tried ECs at least once in the past 12 months. A Polish study found that current use of ECs among Polish adolescents was dramatically higher in a 2013–14 sample than in a 2010–11 sample (29.9% v 5.5%) and that the prevalence of smoking tobacco cigarettes also increased (38% v 23.9%) in that time. With ECs increasingly made attractive to young people via a variety of flavours, Professor Chapman warned that there was as yet no firm evidence about the safety of ECs. Even if they do prove far less dangerous than cigarettes, he wrote, "future policy development in Australia will need to carefully consider how adult smokers wanting access to these products can best be facilitated without reversing the decades-long decline in youth smoking". New South Wales has announced a ban on selling ECs to minors, however similar legislation about tobacco is ignored by many retailers and poorly enforced. "EC proponents argue that nicotine is almost benign in the doses obtained through vaping", Professor Chapman wrote. "But if the EC advocates are wrong, a less than benign genie with its pharmacological clutches around millions of young people may be extremely difficult to put back in the bottle."