QueenOfTheCatBastards can you talk me through this 'normalisation' thing?
Smoking rates are continuing to fall. Among children, smoking rates are falling faster than ever. Researchers have been able to find almost no-one (including children) who vapes regularly who was not first a smoker. Even rarer are people who, having never smoked, take up vaping and then move on to lit tobacco.
Vaping 'normalises' vaping, not smoking. It's providing a gateway out of smoking for millions of people.
Action on Smoking and Health:
Are elecronic cigarettes a gateway to smoking?
It has been hypothesised that electronic cigarettes could act as a ‘gateway’ to smoking tobacco among children and to the renormalisation’ of smoking. However, current evidence suggests this phenomenon is not occurring, at least in Great Britain. In fact, since electronic cigarettes have been on the market, smoking prevalence has declined among children. Whilst some never-smokers are experimenting with electronic cigarettes, regular use is rare among children and current electronic cigarette use is confined almost entirely to those who have already tried smoking.
Derek Yach (the guy who set up WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control): The benefits of e-cigs in helping smokers quit or cut down should be weighed against the danger of either recruiting new smokers or creating e-cig addicts. So far, there is no evidence that either of these things is happening. Studies in both Britain and America suggest that, as e-cig use increases, youth cigarette consumption declines.
Royal College of Physicians: There are concerns that e-cigarettes will increase tobacco smoking by renormalising the act of smoking, acting as a gateway to smoking in young people, and being used for temporary, not permanent, abstinence from smoking. However, the available evidence to date indicates that e-cigarettes are being used almost exclusively as safer alternatives to smoked tobacco, by confirmed smokers who are trying to reduce harm to themselves or others from smoking, or to quit smoking completely.
Royal College of General Practitioners: 1. Entry into smoking: Use among children is rare, and in the small number who do use ENDSs, most who currently smoke are ex-smokers. Only 4% of “never smoker” children in Great Britain had tried ENDS, and regular use was only confined to those who smoked. New regulations around age of sale and restrictions on advertising are likely to reduce what is already an issue of low concern. Overall youth smoking has fallen from 13% in 1996 to 3% in 2014.
Cancer Research UK: Experimentation with e-cigarettes in ‘never smokers’ remains low and coincides with the continuing decline in youth smoking. Arguments about renormalisation and e-cigarettes being a gateway to taking up smoking are not based on evidence.
... for example.