Media outlets often decry vaping while promoting other unhealthy activities.
By George Gay
The Guardian newspaper on Oct. 3 pressed ahead with its apparent campaign to undermine vaping whenever possible with a story headlined “Alarm at rise in vaping among nonsmokers.” This is the first paragraph from Health Editor Andrew Gregory:“One million people in England now vape despite never having been regular smokers, a sevenfold increase in just three years, according to research that has alarmed health experts.”
The research was attributed to a Lancet study led by University College London (UCL) and published in The Lancet Public Health journal.
The first point to make is a minor one but one that is worth mentioning because it crops up in a lot of news stories that would claim to be objective in reporting only the facts but in my view are not. Indeed, The Guardian is published under a banner stating that comment is free while facts are sacred—so what is the word “just” doing in that first paragraph? To my way of thinking, it introduces an opinion into the sentence; it says that the writer believes three years is a short period, but, just in case the reader has different ideas, this “just” is just to put the record straight.
Another point to bear in mind is that we are not told in the story how a vaper is defined, though the study no doubt does give such a definition. In the story, the closest we come to a definition is where it is said that “most [my emphasis] of the people now using e-cigarettes who had never been regular smokers were vaping daily and over a sustained period.” So, insofar as the story is presented, it could be the case that almost half of the 1,006,000 who have taken up vaping after not having been regular smokers might vape once every two days, once every week, once every month ….
More importantly, I read the article and was unable to detect a sense of alarm in what was said by the health experts quoted. Indeed, what is striking about the story is that all the health experts take the opportunity to mention the good that vaping has done in helping smokers quit their habit. One of those experts, Nick Hopkinson, a respiratory physician and chair of Action on Smoking and Health, was quoted as saying also that high levels of vaping among young people and the growing use of vaping among never-smokers was a “concern,” but concern doesn’t come close to alarm in my book. I would feel concern if I had invited four people over for dinner and found at the last minute that I might not have provided enough food for that number. I would feel alarm, however, if I realized that the food I had provided had been contaminated with an emetic, especially if there were only one bathroom in the house.
Beyond that, eagled-eyed readers will have noticed that whereas Hopkinson talks of “never smokers,” the writer is concerned with people who have never been “regular smokers.” These categories are clearly not the same. Indeed, given what we are told about smoking, it is difficult to understand how there could exist smokers who do not indulge their habit regularly. We are told that smoking comprises an addiction so overwhelming that it is more compelling than taking heroin, so how could it be that people can smoke or not smoke as their fancy takes them?
The next thing to note is that the writer is claiming that alarm is being raised over vaping, something that has not, as far as I am aware, killed anybody in England and raises only potential risks at this stage. In what seemed to me to be a fair and balanced statement, the study’s lead author, Sarah Jackson, of the UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care, was quoted, in part, as saying that vaping regularly over a sustained period posed more risk than not vaping. Fair enough, but then crossing the road regularly over a sustained period poses more risk than not crossing the road, and regularly eating sticky buns over a sustained period poses more risk than not eating them, etc., etc.
But let’s look at this another way. The Guardian, which claims to offer a high level of journalism and often does, has for a long time campaigned against vaping while promoting alcohol. Indeed, it has railed in tabloid-type pieces against the use of cartoons on vaping products as being a lure to those underage while on one occasion devoting three quarters of a page to the promotion of a wine that boasts a cartoon character on its label. And it has railed in badly presented stories against the uptake of vaping by the young but has promoted the launch of a wine especially aimed at the young. It promotes alcoholic drinks in its weekly food supplement and runs advertisements for alcoholic drinks.
And while The Guardian raises alarm about people coming to vaping for the first time, it is not alarmed at people who don’t usually drink alcohol getting into it in a big way. On Oct. 16, it ran a story that, for all intents and purposes, was an advertisement for a supermarket wine. Hannah Crosbie wrote in part that the wine was so sweet that she thought it would appeal to people who didn’t particularly like wine. And this was not a story about “sensible drinking,” the usual cop-out used by people in favor of alcohol consumption but against tobacco or nicotine consumption. She promoted the idea of guzzling the wine without thinking about it too much, and later, she asked a question about whether the taste of the wine needed to offer complexity when it was £6.50 ($8.25) a bottle: “Ask me again after my fourth glass,” she signed off.
So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that I cannot remember ever having seen in The Guardian a story about alarm being raised about the number of people in England who previously didn’t drink alcohol but now do. And yet, 40 percent of adults in England drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week when previously they drank no alcohol. That’s about 16 million people while the figures for those who drink at all are about 80 percent and 32 million.
So, alarm is being raised over 1 million people who have taken to a habit that poses a potential risk whereas no alarm is being raised about 16 million people who have taken to drinking alcohol that poses risks known to be serious. According to the Alcohol Change U.K. website, alcohol is a causal factor in more than 60 medical conditions, including mouth, throat, stomach, liver and breast cancers, high blood pressure, cirrhosis of the liver and depression. Alcohol misuse is the biggest risk factor for death, ill-health and disability among 15-year-olds to 49-year-olds in the U.K.*
And according to the Drink Aware website, in 2022, 16 percent of U.K.* adults (about 6.4 million), defined as those older than 16 years of age, reported binge drinking in the previous week while 19 percent (about 7.6 million) did not drink alcohol.
One of those 6.4 million is likely to have been the U.K.’s secretary for health and social care, Wes Streeting, who, in 2023, told The Guardian during an interview: “If I’m going out, I’m a binge drinker—terrible messaging for the shadow health secretary [as he was at that time]!” This was typical of the jokey blokey way in which alcohol is portrayed generally in the U.K. But it is inconceivable that Streeting would have said, or The Guardian would have reported, that he binge smoked or binge vaped during a night out.
But then binge smoking or binge vaping are of course impossible, and, anyway, smoking or vaping doesn’t lead to all those fun memories of alcohol-induced assaults, vomiting in the street, vehicle accidents, arrests, visits to the accident and emergency departments of under-pressure hospitals and the beating of partners and children on arriving home. Memories for those who still have recollections the following day and those who make it home, of course.
Streeting is said to be keen on preventing ill-health as a way of reducing the burden on the U.K.’s National Health Service, though while he seems bent on targeting vaping, I have not seen any move on his part to reduce the level of alcohol consumption, which many people believe would be a good idea. According to Alcohol Change, from 2009 to 2019, the price of alcohol decreased by five percent relative to retail prices and became 13 percent more affordable than in 2008. Alcohol is 74 percent more affordable than it was in 1987.
In relation to the prevention of ill-health, on Oct. 15, there was an excellent debate on the BBC’s Today news program in which two well-informed people who were clearly concerned with doing the right thing spoke about his suggestion that obese people should be given weight reduction injections to help them and help them back into the workforce.
One of those debating this idea mentioned, almost in passing, that while such an idea had merit, it might raise ethical issues. Immediately, the presenter interrupted with a question about why it would raise such issues, which I found strange. You don’t have to be a philosopher—and I am not—to know that one of the basic principles of ethics is that you should treat other people as ends in themselves, not as a means to an end. Providing people who wish to lose weight for the good of their health with the means to do so safely is right and proper, but we surely cross an ethical line when we do so to make them into more productive work units. And a few seconds’ thought about what use weight-loss injections and other medical interventions might be put to, and possibly are being put to, in one of the world’s increasing number of authoritarian regimes is enough to set alarm bells ringing.
And yet we in the U.K. long ago started to move in this direction, in line with neoliberal capitalist ideas. For instance, many years ago, people were redefined as human resources with little pushback. And one of the “problems” with smoking has often been defined as a problem with productivity loss, real or invented by the fevered imaginations of those who simply oppose smoking.
But I digress. I wrote above that Jackson had delivered what I thought was a fair and balanced statement, and this is what else she was quoted as saying: “The public health impact of this substantial rise in vaping among people who have never regularly smoked will depend on what these people would otherwise be doing. It is likely that some would have smoked if vaping were not an available option. In this case, vaping is clearly less harmful.”
And you can take this idea further. Might they, for instance, have taken to drink if not to vaping? Gregory says in his story that, according to the researchers, the “dramatic increase” has been largely driven by young adults, with one in seven 18-year-olds to 24-year-olds (14 percent) in England who had never regularly smoked now using e-cigarettes. It might be coincidental, but anecdotal data seems to indicate that young people are drinking less alcohol than previous generations of young people.
If there is a correlation here, I think it is to be welcomed. In my opinion, the cause of ill-health prevention will be better served if younger generations take to vaping rather than drinking. The message I would take from all this is don’t panic, don’t be alarmed. Try to keep an open mind and seek out the facts.
*I realize that using figures for England and the U.K. is not entirely satisfactory, but it proved impossible to obtain all the figures used only for England. I have mitigated against this problem by not directly comparing figures for England and the U.K. England accounts for about 85 percent of the U.K.’s adult population of about 40 million.