New CDC Study Reveals that Youth Smoking has Declined Despite Tripling of Electronic Cigarette Use Among High Schoolers

A new study released today by the CDC reports that although electronic cigarette use has doubled among middle-school students and tripled among high school students, there was a marked reduction in cigarette smoking in both groups from 2011/12 to 2013.

During this time period, current e-cigarette use among middle-school students increased from 0.6% to 1.1%. At the same time, current cigarette smoking declined from 4.3% to 2.9%.

Among high school students, current e-cigarette use increased from 1.5% to 4.5%. Concurrently, current cigarette smoking dropped from 15.8% to 12.7%.

The study also reported that there were very few never smokers who were currently using electronic cigarettes.

The Rest of the Story

The finding that despite a tripling of current e-cigarette use among high school students, the smoking prevalence among this group dropped substantially suggests that electronic cigarettes are not serving as a major gateway to cigarette smoking among youth.

Although the CDC has been disseminating to the public its contention that electronic cigarettes are a gateway to youth smoking, it has yet to produce a shred of evidence that this is the case. In fact, it has not identified a single youth who started with electronic cigarettes and then progressed to cigarette smoking.

Nevertheless, the CDC director stated last year that: "many kids are starting out with e-cigarettes and then going on to smoke conventional cigarettes."

Given the absence of evidence that e-cigarette use is a gateway to smoking and the lack of any documentation that kids are starting out with e-cigarettes and then progressing to cigarette smoking, it seems that the CDC should correct its earlier statement and apologize for letting it sit out there in the media for more than a year.

It is doing damage because policy makers are accepting this unsupported statement as the truth, and are using it as the basis for stringent regulations of electronic cigarettes which may end up causing more public health harm than good. The benefits of electronic cigarettes in terms of helping smokers to quit or cut down needs to be weighed against the harms in terms of potentially recruiting new smokers or e-cigarette addicts. However, so far there is no evidence that either of these phenomena are occurring.

Certainly, we need to continue to carefully monitor the situation and to conduct research to clearly identify the trajectory and time course of electronic cigarette and tobacco cigarette use among youth. But as a start, we need our public health agencies to be honest with us about the facts. Distorting the science to create more compelling stories or to fulfill predetermined conclusions is not appropriate.

Disclosure: I have not received any funding or compensation from the tobacco, electronic cigarette, or pharmaceutical industries. However, I am seeking funding from several electronic cigarette companies to conduct a behavioral study on the effects of electronic cigarettes on smoking behavior.