E-cigs deserve credit

Evidence suggested that electronic cigarettes deserved some of the credit for a fall in US smoking rates that, according to a recent Gallup announcement, had hit a record low of 16 percent, said Robert Goldberg, vice president at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, in an opinion piece at insidesources.com.
While government initiatives, including smoking restrictions, higher taxes and education campaigns, had helped cut the national smoking rate by nearly two-thirds during the past half century, one in six US citizens still smoked.
‘Enter the private sector,’ he said. ‘The advent of e-cigarettes, which the Royal College of Physicians in Britain concludes are 95 percent less harmful than traditional cigarettes, have coincided with the biggest annual drops in cigarette smoking in decades. Just since 2012, when e-cigarettes began becoming popular, smoking rates have fallen by nearly one-quarter.’
Goldberg quoted the results of a new survey conducted by the independent Center for Substance Use Research in Glasgow of e-cigarette users, which he said, added to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the negative association between e-cigarettes and smoking was causative, not merely correlative.
Goldberg gives details of the survey results and says they are in in line with those of other research, which he describes and cites.
‘Given these public health implications, you’d think e-cigarettes would be welcomed with open arms by government officials,’ Goldberg said. ‘Yet the opposite is true. The Food and Drug Association’s “Deeming Rule” requires e-cigarettes to comply with an approval process so arduous and expensive that it will – in the FDA’s own estimate – result in 99 percent of products not filing applications. The rule is set to take effect in 2022.’