Amid the economic devastation caused by Covid-19, one industry has actually thrived: the cigarette business. Some people are smoking to relieve the emotional and economic stress of lockdowns. But many others returned to smoking when the lower-risk options they relied on, such as nicotine vapor products, became too expensive or hard to find when compared with the combustible tobacco available at every gas station and corner store.
Now, Congress wants to eliminate the ability for adults to receive e-cigarettes by mail, a measure that will reduce access to these life-saving options even after the lockdowns end, Minton writes in National Review.
Buried within the omnibus spending bill passed at the end of last year was the “Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act.” The Act, colloquially called the “vape mail ban,” prohibits the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from delivering nicotine or cannabis vaping products.
One might think that e-cigarette makers could simply switch to private carriers, such as FedEx or UPS. But these private carriers don’t deliver to all addresses, particularly in rural areas. Private carriers actually rely on USPS to make “last mile” deliveries. Even if private carriers did deliver everywhere in the U.S., most — including FedEx, UPS, and DHL — have yielded to the anti-vaping mob, voluntarily ending e-cigarette deliveries.
For any carrier hoping to fill the gap, the new law also imposes strict requirements on records-keeping, tax collection, and reporting. These requirements will significantly raise the cost of e-cigarette deliveries, which will be passed on to consumers. And that added expense, even if relatively small, will be enough to discourage many adults — particularly those in lower-income brackets — from continuing to use e-cigarettes.
Supporters of the law seem to think that if they force adults to quit vaping, they will simply quit using nicotine altogether. They’re dead wrong.
Study after study has shown that policies that make e-cigarettes more expensive can reduce e-cigarette use. But they also increase smoking. The same is true for convenience: The harder it is for smokers to access e-cigarettes, the less willing and able they’ll be to choose e-cigarettes over combustible cigarettes, which are available almost everywhere.
Perhaps some think that more adult smoking is a small price to pay to protect children. More adults smoking is, in their mind, a small price to pay to stop the small percentage of minors willing to break the law to get their hands on e-cigarettes.
MIchelle Minton / Credit: Competitive Enterprise Institute
As the name of the law implies, the purpose of the Preventing Online Sales of E-cigarettes to Children Act is to stop those under 21 years old from illegally purchasing nicotine products online. But if that were really the goal, there are less-extreme approaches, such as requiring an ID check on delivery, a service offered by all major delivery services (and USPS) and that has proved sufficient for alcohol deliveries.
But that’s not the purpose of the law. The real goal is to hurt the legal vaping industry, which the vape mail ban will almost certainly do. It will also be a boon to the illegal vaping market, as well as the traditional cigarette business. What it won’t do is stop youth from buying e-cigarettes. Ironically, it may only make it easier, as less respectable businesses step up to fill the gap in the market that the law is creating.
Most of us would prefer to buy the things we want from licensed, reputable businesses, especially given the dangers associated with illicit goods. But, if regulation prohibits those things or makes them too expensive, it rapidly opens the door for illegal markets. The more unmet demand there is, the larger the illegal market. For example, New York City’s high cigarette taxes led to a vibrant underground market for cheap cigarettes.
The bootleg cigarette business became so widespread, in fact, that by 2013 more than 60 percent of all cigarettes sold in the state were illegal. The continued prohibition on recreational cannabis in some states and high taxes in states where it is legal also explain the continued existence of an illicit THC market, which in 2019 caused thousands of people to be hospitalized and several deaths due to contaminated products.
The illegal market for nicotine vapor is small at the moment, because there remains a relatively vibrant, legal market for adults. But it will grow if lawmakers continue their irrational push to make e-cigarettes as expensive and hard-to-get as possible. And the larger it grows, the easier it will be for youth to buy these products online. That is because, in addition to ignoring shipping laws and skirting taxes, dealers on Snapchat and Facebook aren’t likely to verify the age of their customers.
So, by banning vape mail, Congress is not only kicking legal vapor businesses when they are down, forcing adults back to smoking tobacco, and forfeiting much-needed tax revenue; it is also making youth vaping more likely and more dangerous by encouraging an illicit vapor market and forcing consumers into it.
Michelle Minton is a senior fellow specializing in consumer policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market public policy organization based in Washington, D.C. The author’s opinion may not be the same as Vapor Voice staff.
Public health policy should be guided by science, data and a large dose of common sense. The promised benefits of any policy should be weighed against the known risks and possibility of unintended consequences.
Last February, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would ban the sale of flavored e-cigarettes to adults. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., did not advance in the Senate, but is sure to rear its draconian head in the next Congress, write public health experts Jeff Stier and Henry Miller.
Jeff Stier / senior fellow at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance
The prohibition of the legal sale of flavored e-cigarettes to adults is not supported by science, is undermined by an analysis of the available data, and lacks common sense.
Federal law already bans the sale of all e-cigarettes to anyone under 21, so the Pallone legislation would only change the legal status of the sale of flavored e-cigarettes to adults. That would harm public health, because the data tell us that adult smokers can significantly reduce their health risks if they switch from smoking to vaping. Vaping exposes users to fewer toxic chemicals than smoking cigarettes, and a British study found that long-term cigarette smokers who switched to vaping were halfway toward achieving the vascular health of a non-smoker within a month.
And because e-cigarettes are estimated to be 95 percent less harmful than cigarettes, according to Public Health England, they can be a boon to public health if adult smokers are able to completely and permanently make the switch. But achieving long-term benefits from the shift to vaping from cigarettes requires adherence, and survey after survey has found that adult smokers are better able to maintain the switch if they use flavored vaping products.
Flavors play a critical role in helping smokers quit. A 2018 study published in the Harm Reduction Journal found that, “Adult frequent e-cigarette users in the USA who have completely switched from smoking cigarettes to using e-cigarettes are increasingly likely to have initiated e-cigarette use with non-tobacco flavors and to have transitioned from tobacco to non-tobacco flavors over time.” The authors concluded that e-cigarette flavor bans “may discourage smokers from attempting to switch to e-cigarettes.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is aware of the potential life-saving nature of e-cigarette flavors, noting that “certain flavors may help currently addicted adult smokers switch to potentially less harmful forms of nicotine-containing tobacco products.”
But what about kids using flavored e-cigarettes?
Recent survey data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC) reinforces what we’ve known for a long time: Kids are curious and experiment with risky products. But it’s not the flavors that induce teens to vape. According to the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey, fewer than a quarter of teens who ever used e-cigarettes cited the availability of flavors as a reason for using them.
Although adults and youth equally prefer flavored e-cigarettes to those with tobacco flavor, adults quit smoking in large part because of flavors. Kids vape for lots of reasons, but the availability of flavors isn’t high among them.
Therefore, banning the sale of flavored e-cigarettes to adults in order to prevent youth vaping would be detrimental to public health overall. It would do little, if anything, to curb youth vaping, while it would make it harder for adults to quit smoking.
As misguided as the legislation was when the House voted for it in February, it is even more inappropriate today, now that the Sept. 9 deadline for e-cigarette manufacturers to submit pre-market tobacco applications (PMTAs) to the Food and Drug Administration has passed. As of that date, it is illegal to sell e-cigarettes whose manufacturer has not submitted to the FDA a substantial (and costly) application for each individual product it wishes to sell.
E-cigarettes that are the subject of these applications must meet stringent conditions, including: (1) “[r]isks and benefits to the population as a whole, including people who would use the proposed new tobacco product as well as nonusers”; (2) “[w]hether people who currently use any tobacco product would be more or less likely to stop using such products if the proposed new tobacco product were available”; and (3) “[w]hether people who currently do not use any tobacco products would be more or less likely to begin using tobacco products if the new product were available.”
Because every vaping product, flavored or not, must already meet an extraordinarily high bar, there is no valid rationale for preempting the judgments of FDA scientists and, instead, letting politicians dictate them, as the Pallone bill would do.
If current regulation, supplemented by unprecedented taxpayer-funded education campaigns, doesn’t prevent kids from vaping, there’s no reason to believe they won’t turn to even riskier products in a flourishing black market spawned by a flavor ban.
Jeff Stier is a senior fellow at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He was a research fellow at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.
Tomorrow’s deadline for the submission of premarket tobacco product applications (PMTAs) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) marks the start of a new era for the e-cigarette industry, according to an article published by The Motley Fool.
Companies who fail to apply for marketing authorization by the deadline will be required to remove their hardware and e-liquids from store shelves, and The Motley Fool expects many e-cigarette companies to exit the business.
Because the cost of complying with the regulations is staggeringly high, many manufacturers will not be able to make it over the hurdle, and the e-cigarette market will be left largely to the tobacco giants.
Although the FDA estimates a single PMTA costs anywhere from $117,000 to $466,000, those figures are considered low by the industry. The Rocky Mountain Smoke-Free Association estimates a single PMTA costs between $8.6 million and $11.1 million per stock keeping units. It forecasts 14,000 small vape businesses employing 166,000 workers will be destroyed, representing $24 billion in economic activity.
Deep-pocketed Philip Morris International, by contrast, already has four separate PMTAs approved: one for its IQOS heated-tobacco device and three for flavors of its disposable HeatSticks.
As of Aug. 31, the FDA had received applications for around 2,000 deemed products, of which around 40 percent have been resolved, according to Mitch Zeller, director of the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products.
Regulation of e-cigarettes and other smoke-free nicotine products became a major topic during the virtual Global Nicotine Forum 2020 (GFN 2020) this year as advocates seek a more promising solution for smokers to quit.
The forum, themed “Nicotine: Science, Ethics and Human Rights,” was held on June 11-12, saw 30 experts across the globe speak, all with one common goal; to provide a safe and transparent industry for both smokers and those planning to make the switch to alternative tobacco products.
Discussions started with how attacks on the THR (tobacco harm reduction) movement has been intensified with fake news, misleading studies and unethical media campaigns. All speakers agreed that action needed to be taken immediately before things worsen and that the technology needed to be regulated, not restricted or banned.
Adult consumers should have access to their choice of regulated devices and liquid as it can substantially reduce the risks suffered by smokers from the tar, which is the byproduct of smoke. The THR advocates also highlighted that consumers needed to be truthfully and wholly informed of the life-saving potential of vaping.
Credit: Tasnim Lokman
Anaesthesiologist Dr John Oyston spoke on the importance of a patient-centred approach where he spoke of patients who needed removal of their lungs or amputation of the leg due to their smoking habit.
He said that if these patients did not smoke or had stopped smoking at middle age, such procedures were unnecessary.
“I’ve seen the damage cigarettes do to the human body or to the human lives. I believe tobacco is the real pandemic,” he said.
“Even in this plagued year, tobacco is on track to kill five times as many people as Covid-19. E-cigarettes are far many times safer than combustible cigarettes and it makes no sense for us to allow people to continue smoking cigarettes.
“Banning e-cigarettes is an infringement to people’s right to choose a safer alternative and to make their own healthcare decisions.”
Oyston, who has nearly 40 years of medical practice under his belt, said e-cigarettes could save about six million lives in the United States and yet some people are trying to ban it and prevent them from being utilised.
“The global tobacco industry makes US$62 billion (RM264.1 billion) in profit and at the cost of 7 million deaths every year. They accept the death of half of their customers as sacrifice they have to pay in order to make money,” he said.
Conference director Professor Gerry Stinson said nicotine was among the top three most favourite drugs globally and calling the traditional cigarette “a dirty nicotine delivery system,” highlighting that it was the combustion that causes the problem.
Stinson, who is from Imperial College London and formerly part of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, stated that if the nicotine was separated from the cigarette itself, such as what vaping, snus and Heat-Not-Burn products, it gave smokers potential to switch away from smoking.
Dubbing these new technologies as a “free gift to public health,” Stinson, however, admitted that many smokers globally continued to be misled by major campaigns against THR.
Meanwhile, Professor David Sweanor echoed the same idea, saying that these new nicotine products had the potential for the biggest breakthrough in public health. He said advocates, experts and stakeholders needed to use the principles of reason, science and humanism to look at what is available and work out what could be done.
Stinson and Sweanor both touched on the role of taxation, stating that consumers would likely switch to vaping if it was cheaper and more accessible compared to the cigarette.
“Safer nicotine products have to be cheaper but there’s more we can do to make them accessible. No doubt countries will be concerned about the loss of tax revenue — but please think of this and how important it is.
“The opportunity we have is to fundamentally change the course of public health history, relegating cigarettes to history’s ashtray,” Sweanor said.
He also reiterated that separating nicotine from cigarette was safer and less harmful to body as it removed the deathly ingredient; tar. He quoted Michael Russel, “People smoke for the nicotine but die from the tar.”
The forum also agreed that regulation for the nicotine products was vital to avoid a repeat of the national outbreak of e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury (Evali) crisis that took over the United States last year.
Director of Pro-Vapeo Mexico Dr Roberto A Sussman said the certain parties had taken advantage of the Evali crisis to spread misinformation and fear on vaping which did not only affected the States but globally as well.
“This was seen in many polls. For example, 66 per cent of Americans thought incorrectly that Evali was caused by Juul (an e-cigarette brand) and other vaping devices.
“Unfortunately, only 28 per cent thought correctly that this surge of disease was caused by the illegal THC vape pens,” the physics lecturer at National University of Mexico said.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after completing investigations in February, recommended that people not use THC-containing e-cigarette or vaping products since it has identified vitamin E acetate, often used as an additive in THC-containing products, as a chemical of concern.
More than 30 countries worldwide have banned e-cigarettes as of 2020 including Thailand, Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia. As of April last year (2019), Malaysia’s former Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad announced a new bill whilst pointing out that at present tobacco cigarettes and e-cigarettes are regulated under different directives.
Cigarettes are regulated by the Control of Tobacco Product Regulations 2004 under the Food Act 1983, while e-cigarette liquid containing nicotine, falls under the Poisons Act 1952. He stated that the new bill will underline all regulations and controls on e-cigarettes and vapes, including the sales guidelines.
However, there has been no news or updates following the change in government back in March and Covid-19 pandemic.
The international health profession is rightly focused on the SARS-CoV-2 virus threat at the moment. Meanwhile, another multinational threat has insidiously spread: Alarmism about nicotine vapor products (aka e-cigarettes) has infected a growing number of governments around the world, causing authorities to eschew science, logic, and human nature. Out of blind panic, they are disregarding the indisputable evidence that giving smokers legal access to nicotine vapor can save millions of lives. Instead, they embrace prohibitionist policies that will keep people smoking and dying. The main culprit behind spreading this mass psychosis is, sadly, the United States.
MIchelle Minton / Credit: Competitive Enterprise Institute
I have written extensively about agencies, health charities, and activists who have orchestrated the campaign of fear and doubt around e-cigarettes—products that even notorious anti-vaping advocates, like University of California San Francisco Professor Stanton Glantz, admit are substantially less toxic than smoking. I and others have dissected the financial and professional benefits that drive the campaign to ban nicotine vapor products even while deadly cigarettes remain freely available. Here, I will discuss the methods by which these entities cultivate and export e-cigarette alarmism worldwide.
The three main players in the tragicomedy public discourse on e-cigarettes are: representatives of government agencies, public health activists, and the media. The media has acted mostly as a megaphone for government agencies and activists, parroting and amplifying the narrative disseminated by government actors and activists. This post will focus primarily on how anti-tobacco activists, in and outside of government, created and sold those narratives.
Statistical Sleights of Hand
Authorities in the U.S. have become pioneers in the art of statistical hocus pocus. They managed to transform limited evidence about shifting trends in vaping among young people into supposed proof of a full-blown nicotine-use crisis. And, like any good magician, performing this trick often involves misdirection. In the case of statistics, such misdirection is often achieved by:
Focusing on the scariest-sounding data;
Using the scariest language to describe data; and
Ignoring or downplaying details that put the data in a less scary context.
A good example is the way government, media, and anti-vaping activists used the results of the 2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), a survey of middle and high school students, administered annual by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Months before the 2018 NYTS data were made public, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that the results showed youth vaping had become an “epidemic.” The media repeated the information, as dictated by the FDA, over and over again so that, by the time results were actually released, it hardly mattered what the survey really showed. The narrative had been set in the public mind: Teens were now vaping nicotine in epidemic proportions. Of course, once researchers were finally able to analyze the data, they found little more than smoke and mirrors.
Highlight the scariest data. Media outlets from Fox News to National Public Radio ran headlines with some variation of the talking point that between 2017 and 2018 youth vaping had doubled and now one in five youth were users of nicotine vapor products. This generated public concern and interest in solving the problem, which, of course, was the goal.
What neither the FDA nor the media highlighted, however, was that this data point only referred to the number of students who reported any vaping in the 30 days prior to the survey. While it could mean some of those youth were vaping nicotine every day, it also meant some portion may have only vaped once, perhaps for the first time, and never again. That’s what a later examination of the data found. The vast majority of youth who reported “vaping” on the NYTS did so on a handful of days. In fact, less than 1 percent of underage students who never smoked reported vaping regularly.
Use scary language. In 2017, 11.7 percent of students reported any past-month use of e-cigarettes in the NYTS. In 2018, that number rose to 20.8 percent, a 9 percent increase year over year. But a 9 percent increase in youth vaping just doesn’t sound as scary as youth vaping “doubled.” Again, that’s the point. The use of relative versus absolute numbers is often employed specifically to make something appear more important.
Downplay mitigating details. Within weeks of the FDA’s announcement, the existence of a youth vaping epidemic took on the status of indisputable truth. And the matter of how e-cigarettes impact youth health eclipsed considerations about the products’ potential benefits for adults and the hazards that always accompany any sort of prohibition. The national survey had, after all, shown a doubling in the numbers with over 20 percent of students (one in five) now vaping nicotine. Except, in addition to ignoring the fact that most youth were not vaping regularly, both the FDA and the media ignored the fact that the survey did not say what youth were vaping.
The NYTS questionnaire asked students about their use of “e-cigarettes,” which it describes as “battery powered devices that usually contain a nicotine-based liquid that is vaporized and inhaled.” However, researchers have found that most of the students who report “vaping” on surveys about e-cigarettes don’t use nicotine. For example, a study from 2016 found that approximately 65 percent of the 12th, 10th, and eighth grade students who used e-cigarettes reporting using “just flavoring” without nicotine. More recent research indicates that a substantial portion of youth who report “vaping” also use cannabis. In fact, 50 percent of students who reported any e-cigarette use and 70 percent of those who reported frequent use on NYTS also said they had used marijuana in e-cigarettes.
Arguably the most important detail ignored in panic over youth vaping was the fact that, despite fears about vaping leading to smoking, youth smoking rates were continuing to decline. In fact, the rate of smoking among both adolescents and adults hit a record low in 2018 and have continued to decline since. But the FDA and most media outlets paid little attention to the details about how often youth were vaping, what they were vaping, and what effect it might be having on health because these details might not produce the same level of alarm as the idea of an “epidemic,” which again, is the point. And it worked.
Over the following years, not a day would pass without some new headline about the problem of youth vaping, the evil e-cigarette companies targeting teens, or the need for authorities to do something. As a result, counties and states have begun to prohibit e-cigarettes, the federal government raised the national minimum tobacco purchasing age to 21, banned non-tobacco flavors for pre-filled vaping devices, and is currently considering a bevy of additional restrictions to make these products less attractive, harder to obtain, and more expensive for adult smokers. Given that e-cigarettes, particularly flavored e-cigarettes, are the most effective means of helping smokers quit smoking, this should not be hailed as a victory. But, at least among those morally opposed to nicotine use, it was. Now they are seeking to export that “successful” strategy to the rest of the world.
American Panic Down Under
Despite the irrefutable evidence that non-combustible forms of nicotine are vastly safer than combustible tobacco, a long and growing list of countries now ban the sale, importation, or even possession of such products, like India, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore and Uruguay. Whenever the debate about such bans arises in any new country, invariably it is followed by attempts to infect that debate with American-style vape panic.
A recent example has unfolded in Australia over the last few months, where, though nicotine vaping is banned, the country’s estimated 300,000 vapers have managed to skirt the prohibition by having nicotine shipped from overseas. This June, however, Health Minister Greg Hunt threatened to close that loophole by banning the importation of nicotine beginning in July—weeks before Parliament returned from their summer holiday. The justifications for the ban were the youth vaping “epidemic” in America, rising incidence of nicotine poisoning in Australia, and increases in vaping among young adults.
Highlight the scariest data with the scariest language. In announcing his proposed ban, Hunt pointed both to the “78 percent increase” in youth vaping in the United States and a claim that nicotine poisonings in Australia had doubled since 2018, which according to him, was caused primarily by “imported products of dubious quality and safety.” Never mind that the only reason Australians must import nicotine of dubious quality is because the country banned nicotine vaping. The relative language Hunt uses about poisonings certainly sounds scary. But, as you might guess, the absolute numbers seem far less dire.
Downplay mitigating details. The source for Hunt’s claim comes from the Victorian Poisons Centre, which as Hunt noted in a press release, reported 21 cases of nicotine poisoning in 2018 and 41 cases in 2019. A look at the data for 2018 (2019 is not yet publicly available) shows that there were actually 100 calls made to the Centre related to “antismoking products,” which it defines as nicotine gum, lozenges, patches, Chantix, and e-cigarettes. What this means, assuming Hunt’s figure is correct, is that while 21 calls were related to e-cigarettes, 79 calls were related to other products. To put that in panic-speak, products that are legally sold over the counter in Australia caused almost four times as many poisonings as e-cigarettes, which Hunt wants to ban.
Thanks to backlash from vapers around the world, as well as members of his own government, Hunt was compelled to back away from his proposed ban, at least temporarily. But this seems to have inspired anti-vaping advocates to try harder in copying successful, panic-inducing tactics employed in the United States. Most recently, it appears they are trying to replicate exactly the slight of hand American activists pulled off with the 2018 NYTS.
When All Else Fails: Lie
On July 16, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released the 2019 results of their national survey on drug use, which is conducted every three years. According to news reports, like this one in The Guardian, it found that e-cigarette use among young Australian non-smokers had quadrupled since 2013! Furthermore, a shocking 65 percent of adolescents and 39 percent of young “report using e-cigarettes despite having never smoked.” As is the point, stories like this are sure to shock Australians and spur efforts to keep or even strengthen the country’s nicotine vaping ban to get this problem under control. Of course, as with the youth vaping “epidemic” in America, the problem doesn’t exist; it’s statistical hocus pocus.
The data released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is, admittedly, confusing. So, it is at least possible that the author of The Guardian article simply erred in stating that 65 percent of non-smoking adolescents reported “vaping.” Nonetheless, this isn’t just misdirection; it’s outright wrong. What the data show is that among the respondents who said they had ever used an e-cigarette in their life, almost 65 percent of those aged 14 to 17 said they were non-smokers at the time they first tried an e-cigarette (table 2.27.) First, this doesn’t mean they were “never smokers,” only that they hadn’t smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime, nor does it mean they continued using an e-cigarette. The survey, in fact, indicates that only 8 percent of youth, aged 14 to 17, ever tried an e-cigarette (table 2.19), and among all respondents who ever tried an e-cigarette, most—87 percent—tried it only once or twice and never again (table 2.28). So, how many non-smoking youngsters in Australia are actually currently “vaping?” From what the survey reveals, almost none.
The survey perplexingly defines “current use” as using e-cigarettes “daily, weekly, monthly, or less than monthly.” [Emphasis added] Functionally, it seems as if any use in the last 12 months counts as current use. But, even with that broad definition, the proportion of non-smoking youth who currently use e-cigarettes has remained strikingly small at 1.3 percent among those aged 14 to 17.
As for the statement about “quadrupling” e-cigarette use among non-smokers, you can see from the numbers that this is false. They could accurately say that current use of e-cigarettes among non-smokers increased 75 percent among adolescents and 50 percent among young adults. But it would still be misleading, a prime example of how using relative terms can exaggerate insignificant changes to extremely small absolute numbers. And that is exactly how unwarranted panics are generated. It’s not clear if the author of The Guardian article meant to mislead or simply misunderstood the data. But we can certainly expect more of this sort of statistical sleight of hand if and when the debate over whether Australia should continue to deny smokers a life-saving alternative takes center stage.
Michelle Minton is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Minton specializes in consumer policy, covering regulatory issues that include gambling, tobacco harm reduction, cannabis legalization, alcohol, and nutrition.
