I'm 36. Virtually all of my male peers, and probably half of my female friends in high school and college smoked at least casually. Many smoked
very casually, and I certainly wouldn't characterize them as smokers, but they were quite familiar with what it is to smoke a cigarette.
Now which of our anecdotal evidence is more compelling, mine or yours? More importantly, which is more relevant? I'd say neither.
Based on tobacco control's statistics, it's fairly uncontroversial to argue that the proportion of youth smokers has fallen, but it'd be a stretch to argue that youth smoking is now a
rare thing, relative to smoking among the general population. I won't call you a liar; to the extent that I can offer any comment on the personal experiences you've shared with us, all I can do is to congratulate you for raising your daughter well: apparently she ran with the right crowds in school. I most assuredly did not.
I don't doubt that it happens. Vaping may very well inhabit the perfect niche for people of all ages who seek petty rebellion. On the other hand, young people seeking petty rebellion tend to be those most inclined to take up smoking -- or they were before vaping came on the scene, anyway.
The bolded line is where you cross over into baseless fear-mongering. There's no reason to believe that vastly more minors vape than
would smoke. Even the CDC didn't try to make that argument in their cooked-data study about under-age e-cig use. CDC may have tried to
insinuate what you just said, but they wouldn't dare declare it outright as you have.
If anything, the data CDC collected suggests that the introduction of e-cigs has
reduced cigarette consumption among middle and high school students. Most people would consider that a good thing, which is why the spin machine pointed instead at the year-to-year increase in the number of kids who had
tried an e-cig. 'Cause, you know, it's super important and interesting to observe that a kid who tried an e-cig
once in 2010 and never touched one ever again still counts in the tried-it category a year later.
The non-vaper has the right not to be
coerced, just as the vaper has a right not to be coerced. That is, a non-vaper has every right to demand that no one vape on his property, or on property she rents or manages. The non-vaper also has every right to try to convince the owners/managers of properties he frequents to disallow vaping. Finally, the non-vaper has every right to complain about people vaping in any given situation -- in other words, the non-vaper has the right to do her small part to mold society's understanding of vaping etiquette, which is still, by the way, largely unsettled.
Apart from that? A non-vaper can always leave the area, when all else fails, just as anyone might choose to leave if he felt overwhelmed with an unpleasant aroma. That's what freedom means, not that any particular group, even a majority group, can give themselves the right never to be exposed to generally innocuous sights, sounds, or smells that annoy them.
I note here that the general public happily endured the odor of
cigarettes for decades if not centuries; there was no credible support for government-enforced smoking restrictions until authorities successfully argued that second-hand smoke poses a significant
health risk. Why should our response to public vaping be any different?
You describe a dichotomy where none exists: the moneyed interests are responsible for advancing the children's-new-addiction narrative. The extent to which that narrative might bespeak a justifiable concern remains in question, but what isn't (or shouldn't be) debatable is whether the concern trumps the rights of consenting adults: if the authorities are incapable of enforcing laws banning sales to minors, and if the parents are unable or unwilling to pick up the authorities' slack, why is that
my problem?
"We can't keep kids from buying stuff they shouldn't buy, so the only solution is to make the stuff so unattractive or expensive that kids won't
want to buy it! And oh by the way, we have no evidence that the forbidden stuff in this case actually represents any substantial danger to children even if they do use it." Crazy.
