Vaping is Not a Gateway to Smoking - Vaping360
It’s been a tradition among anti-
vaping researchers to try to prove a gateway from vaping to smoking. It’s seems like a magnet for every researcher lacking either pride or good sense, or both. And as we know, the list of tobacco control zealots limited in those areas is long, deep and continuous.
But it never gets old. The “gateway theory” is an anti-vaping touchstone. Or a cobblestone. Or something. Anyway, they really like trying to do it — and as we’ve
seen many before, ...
Experts: Teen Vaping Gateway Study Is Meaningless - Vaping360
...they can’t prove anything.
This is such a hot topic, Clive Bates
wrote
How not to be duped by gateway effect claims
...a blog post about the common pitfalls encountered by excited researchers writing about gateways, and how journalists can spot them — because no self-respecting gateway proponent forgets to issue a frightening press release.
Now we have a
new gateway effort, this one a “meta review,” which combines the data from multiple previous studies to (supposedly) draw more reliable conclusions. It’s in the journal Pediatrics, which has published more than its share of gateway speculation.
The authors make up a who’s who of terrible vaping researchers, including Jessica Barrington-Trimis and Jennifer Unger of the University of Southern California — who’ve been around the block with gateways
before — and
Samir Soneji of Dartmouth. The full list is too long to print. Everyone wanted in on this.
The criteria they used to choose the studies for their review were these: “longitudinal studies reporting odds ratios for cigarette smoking initiation associated with ever use of e-cigarettes or past 30-day cigarette smoking associated with past 30-day e-cigarette use.” Wait a minute, that a lot of association…right?
...
In other words, an association doesn’t necessarily mean one thing causes the other. The authors do their best to make the association sound like cause and effect, but all they can do is huff and puff about it. “e-Cigarette use was associated with greater risk for subsequent cigarette smoking initiation and past 30-day cigarette smoking,” they write. But as Prof. McNeill said, it’s just as likely that the study participants are the sort of kids likely to try anything.
Last year, writing about Barrington-Trimis’s first trip through the gateway, Dr. Michael Siegel
concluded that “as vaping has become more popular among youth, it has displaced cigarette smoking and contributed towards the de-normalization of cigarette smoking.” And so far, that’s what real world numbers suggest.
