Alarmist UK E-Cig Newspaper Story Debunked

While every power mad politician and gravy training ‘health advocate’ in the US piles on to the nascent e cigarette industry to advance their own interests there’s plenty of fearful hysteria in the United Kingdom as well. The British tabloid press is notorious for hysterical headlines and that was evident in a Daily Mirror story that warned of children getting addicted to e-cigarettes due to the many tasty flavors available.

Like all of the ‘talking points’ from the e-cigarette prohibitionists the story was long on speculation and anecdote and completely bereft of statistics or hard data. This was true not only for the existence of the problem (children using e-cigarettes) but also the causality (tasty flavors being the reason that children are using e-cigs). That didn’t stop it from being widely reported as fact in other media outlets and by the usual coterie of health scolds.

There’s only one problem–it’s not true at all. That was the verdict of the information arm of the British National Health Service who debunked the story as complete rubbish. The Daily Mirror story was based on an opinion piece looking at the prevalence of teen smoking in Wales and speculating that tasty flavors could lead to more e-cig use that could then serve as a gateway for tobacco use–a very tenuous theory to say the least. Unfortunately the newspaper reported the opinion piece as if it were factual and the NHS countered with their own findings which suggested that ‘a few’ teens in Wales had tried e-cigarettes though most knew what they were. Not exactly an epidemic by any means. The NHS survey didn’t address causality so the suggestion that e-cigarettes were attracting kids due to the variety of flavors or that they’re a ‘gateway’ to tobacco use is the same mere speculation that fuels the arguments of ‘health advocates’ worldwide on the subject.

Not that any of this is surprising. In the US, the same parasites that have made a career out of demonizing smoking are looking for a new gravy train. They’re able to feed on the American fear of technological change and the maddening habit of politicians to seek preemptive prohibition of new technology–or for that matter *anything* new. And just like the media in the US carries water for these non contributing members of society the exact same dynamic is on display in England.