The vaping paradigm

Matt Ridley has a great piece about the inventor of vaping and how he developed the technology so he could stop smoking himself.

Today more than a million smokers in Britain have quit by using e-cigarettes, and at least another million have cut down. The number is growing all the time, and it’s now easily the most popular method of quitting tobacco. That means a lot less lung cancer, heart disease, stinky clothing and fire risk. What’s more, none of these people had to get a prescription, or be subsidised by the taxpayer or treated by the NHS, as with other methods of quitting such as patches, gum, psychiatry or acupuncture. It’s a purely voluntary, private-sector solution.

You would think the public health authorities would be shouting this from the rooftops, but the Welsh government is trying to ban the use of e-cigarettes in enclosed public spaces, the British Medical Association remains implacably disapproving, the World Health Organisation censorious, and the European Commission set on banning refillable versions. Southern Rail is banning vaping on its trains from next month, and Starbucks, Caffè Nero, All Bar One, and KFC also have bans.

The opponents fear that vaping is a gateway into smoking, when all the evidence suggests it’s a floodgate out. The number of ‘never smokers’ who vape remains negligible. I am genuinely baffled by how hard it is to get medics to understand the concept of harm reduction: that if people are doing something harmful but hard to give up, you should encourage them to switch to something much less harmful that satisfies their urges. They talk of vaping as ‘renormalising smoking’, which makes about as much sense as saying coffee-drinking renormalises whisky-drinking. It’s denormalising smoking.

It's a good example of how entrenched ideas fall hard.

Another is the consensus on cholesterol:

http://joannenova.com.au/2015/05/cholesterol-how-the-web-and-books-are-years-ahead-of-consensus-and-govt/

The EPA released a report showing that fracking is not nearly the problem some people insist it is:

http://www2.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-06/documents/hf_es_erd_jun2015.pdf