Yeah, I'll play along but I am miffed that I submitted six responses, one as benign as responding to SS's character role post, .. and nothing was approved. Not a single one was confrontational, I wrote it like I was responding to any Graduate Student or Reporter.
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Kristin, I'd like to add a point to the mix that Fred never approved in one of my posts. The most common denominator in smoking, especially teenage smoking, is the Culture Wars against our kids. There is this assumption that kids take the habit of doing whatever their parents do well into their teenage years. This has repeatedly been debunked in the last twenty years. As it relates to addiction and violence there are a few glaring examples:
- Sex and teen pregnancy (you already covered that specifically)
- Teenage smoking actually went down during the first few years of the Joe Camel promotion. The causation was never Joe Camel in teenage smoking. It was the sudden belief that restricting kids from the smoking culture was the appropriate response. They were already responding to their parents and the laws around not doing it in a statistically significant way.
- The same basic thing happened in the last few years with Alcoholic Energy Drinks. It wasn't until we decided to pipe it was dangerous and against the kids that teenagers starting flocking to it in droves. Until then they were quite content with the dual but seperate ride in energy drink consumption and alcohol consumption.
- Video game violence is actually the worst case of this. Lt. Colonel David Grossman, while a genius with adult law enforcement and military studies, became part of the problem on the issue of kids with violence. So much so that for the past seven/eight years pretty much every paper on the topic cites his original work and metrics and ends up being flawed in two key ways that nobody ever notices. 1) The logic and the proposed metrics would basically mean that today every school would be dealing with multiple violent firearm episodes a month. 2) That street violence would be coming with the current generation of gamers and that hasn't even come close to happening.
The Culture Wars against our teenagers is far more damaging that people realize. And what we think is "cool", is NOT what teenagers think is cool. No matter how hard we try to project that down on them. So the issue of flavoring, mods, etc. just doesn't hold up any better than a Straw Man.
Anecdotal evidence, in my region, shows this has played out to a tee. Teens have the option of 808s and don't take it. They think it's silly, it's not cool until they get the dangerous whole experience. And college kids that have moved passed that phase and use e-cigs use them for harm reduction. Those few that pick up e-cigs are their "first" smoking almost always never admit that they were hookah lounge regulars and don't even consider the ~hookah~ smoking.
The same cycles will repeat with e-cigs as the current generation of youngsters hit their teenage years. tobacco won't be outlawed by then and they'll be on analogs or some variant. Or they'll be on the most sinfully dangerous version of what's available because that's what they do. And the teenage mind is wired differently enough that they consistently do exactly what we don't want them to do.
So stop developing your biases against something based on your fears of teenagers. That's not a worthwhile metric, you'll get it wrong. Start developing the same awareness and understanding of risk that we do with drunk driving, regular analogs, etc. and don't treat it like it's something they should be beholden too. And they won't.
-Magnus
EDIT: I wish I saved my QSMB responses because I was better rested and it actually read well. The above is a train wreck. Urgh.
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But we are going to an outdoor concert tonight, so the good weather is still appreciated. 
