Is it possible the FDA isn't pushing e-cig studies because they don't want it to be proven harmless?

[jpargana]

Well, the irony is that in a way, the FDA has already proven that e-cigs are indeed safer than tobacco, at least concerning nitrosamines... there was a study where FDA recommended the ban of e-cigs, because they found nitrosamines in e-juice. The same study used the Nicotrol inhaler as a 'control group', but the results of the inhaler were not published... strange, right? Not quite, considering that the level of nitrosamines one can find in the inhaler is the same found in e-juice! (Both products use liquid nicotine in their formula, so...) That's why they did not publish those results. It would be difficult to tell people "Product A should be banned because we found nitrosamines in it, at the same levels of product B, which we ourselves approved as safe some years ago..."
The truth is, not many people are quitting Nicotrol to start vaping, so the chosen 'control group' (Whose results they did not have the guts to publish) is inapropriate. The 'control' should be, in fact, a cigarette. Compared to cigarettes, the 'scary levels' of nitrosamines found in e-juice are still about 1800 times lower! So, all the FDA managed to prove to me is that we seem to be on the right track, because, at least as far as nitrosamines are concerned, we are now exposing ourselves to 1/1800 of the previous levels! And they cannot even argue that the study is biased... they did it, not some e-cig company trying to protect their business...!

 

[Eranda13]

Yes, I realized the FDA doesn't tax anything

I was just referring to the concept that if e-cigs are considered "tobacco" they can be taxed like tobacco- i.e. heavily. If it's determined that they need to be regulated, then the government has the possibility of controlling who produces it, how much they can produce, where it can be sold, how much it can be sold for, etc etc.

So it would seem to me that it could potentially be a financial bonanza to get e-cigs under the regulatory balloon of the FDA. There's your motivation right there...

So if they already know or suspect that they can't get it regulated- the next best thing would be to do nothing and let public panic do their job for them (limiting the number of people who take up vaping), right? BT is happy, BP is happy, and all the anti-smoking nazis are happy. Win-win.

 

[kristin]

There have been numerous studies proving that public second-hand smoke isn't a public health risk, yet that didn't stop the ANTZ from banning public smoking - now even outdoors, where it is even less likely to create any risk at all. With that kind of success, they probably don't care if there are studies showing e-cigarettes are safe. They will just cherrypick their own studies like they did with SHS and low-risk, smoke-free tobacco.

Read: Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer

Note that even though it's a WHO press release denying claims that their own study found no significant evidence of a link between lung cancer and SHS, in paragraph four they admitted the facts: "The study found that there was an estimated 16% increased risk of lung cancer among nonsmoking spouses of smokers. For workplace exposure the estimated increase in risk was 17%. However, due to small sample size, neither increased risk was statistically significant." So WHO tried to blame the results on a small sample size. However, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, where the results were published, the researchers clearly state: "An important aspect of our study in relation to previous studies is its size, which allowed us to obtain risk estimates with good statistical precision..." The press release also doesn't mention the one statistically significant result from the study, that children raised by smokers were 22% less likely to get lung cancer. The researchers also found that "Vehicles and public indoor settings did not represent an important source of ETS exposure." (At a time when there were far fewer indoor smoking bans, especially in Europe.)

Here is the first actual WHO study: http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/90/19/1440.pdf