Want to help smokers quit? Stop lying about e-cigs

America’s public health establishment, including big nonprofit organizations and many academics, is playing a shameful role in fighting our nation’s most important health scourge: cigarette smoking. Without exception, our health leaders have proven reluctant to help smokers quit; although three-quarters of smokers wish to do so, only one in twenty succeed in any given year.

The reasons for the officials’ dereliction in this area include a stubborn adherence to a worldview mired in the 20th century “tobacco wars.” But more important is their inexcusable willful blindness to, or complicity with, the intentional manipulation of science.

The CDC trumpeted the recently-reported decline in smoking rate to 17.8 percent — a barely perceptible reduction from last year’s figure. But behind this self-congratulatory façade stands the unpleasant reality: The number of American smokers stands at 42 million, about the same number as a decade ago. Worse, the latest estimates are that almost a half million of us die every year from smoking-related diseases.

While the official agencies urge smokers to use the FDA-approved methods to help them quit, they neglect to inform them that these methods — gums, nicotine patches, drugs —are not terribly effective. They actually warn smokers who want to quit against trying reduced-harm nicotine delivery devices such as e-cigarettes and vapor products (“e-cigs”). They go out of their way to alarm desperate smokers about hypothetical concerns — and their scare tactics work. More smokers are now fearful of trying these products than last year. Media comments by officials of the CDC and the big nonprofits (American Lung Association, American Cancer Society, among others) imply that the nascent, innovative e-cig industry is merely a ploy by “Big Tobacco” to lure young people into nicotine addiction.

Such assertions are mere propaganda, as their spokesmen well know. Rather than being pawns of tobacco companies, the harm-reduction “industry” consists of thousands of small businesses. Further, recent surveys — including the CDC’s own— indicate that e-cigs are actually helping young smokers quit their deadly addiction by “vaping” (the term for using e-cigs) — just as their elders are doing. “Experts” based at academic centers, including especially the University of California-San Francisco, as well as highly-placed CDC officials, are widely quoted opposing the uptake of e-cigs, although millions of smokers have at last escaped their cigarette addiction by vaping.

While the long-term effects of e-cigs are unproven now, numerous published studies show that their efficacy in helping smokers quit is at least equal to the FDA-approved products, with fewer adverse effects. Those data are consistent with common sense, as e-cigs deliver only nicotine, water and a mist of safe humectants and (if preferred) flavors, as compared with the hundreds of toxins and carcinogens in cigarette smoke.

How can the drumbeat of official opprobrium directed against these miraculous, lifesaving devices be explained? One possibility: greed. The “Big Pharma” companies that market ineffective but highly lucrative nicotine-replacements are very generous donors to the same public health groups whose minions travel around the country regaling regulators and legislators to ban e-cigs. While their rationale (“protecting our children”) sounds believable to the media and politicians, in fact their agendas are antithetical to public health. They never disclose their conflicts of interest involving millions of dollars of pharmaceutical company funding, believing themselves exempt from such ethical dicta.

This unethical breach of public trust will crush the burgeoning, decentralized e-cig “industry.” It will effectively protect cigarette markets (whose excise taxes prop up many state and local budgets), and, lest we forget, it will keep smokers smoking. These officials know that addiction will eventually kill over one-half of smokers, and sicken twenty-fold that number. Isn’t it time that smokers and the public heard the truth?