Why Does Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes (PAVE) Have to Lie in Order to Scare Parents?

If I seriously thought that one-fourth of today's youth were vaping e-cigarettes daily, I would be quite alarmed. Daily use suggests possible addiction and so if 25% of all youth were vaping daily, we would be talking about 6.25 million middle-school and high-school students who are vaping every day. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of every day youth e-cigarette users are not just vaping nicotine, but they are also using THC vapes, mostly off the black market. So if this statistic were true, it would drastically change my assessment of the relative benefits of electronic cigarettes for adult smoking cessation compared to the risks for youth vaping and addiction.

Well, according to Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes (PAVE), this very statistic is in fact true! According to PAVE: "More than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily." So it's actually more than 25% of youth who are daily e-cigarette users. This means there are well over 6 million youth daily vapers. Even worse, only 3.2% of adults vape daily, so the proportion of youth who vape daily is 8 times higher than the proportion of adults who vape daily. Perhaps even more alarming, this means that for 2 adult vapers, there is one youth daily vaper.

The Rest of the Story

There's only one problem with this statistic from PAVE ...

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...

... It isn't true!

According to data from the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey, the proportion of youth who use e-cigarettes daily is not 25%, it is 1.6%. So PAVE is off by a factor of 16. Another way of saying this is that PAVE has inflated the proportion of youth who use e-cigarettes daily by 16 times its actual value in an apparent effort to create quite a scare among parents and the public at large.

Compare PAVE's "facts" with those of the FDA:

PAVE - More than 25% of youth use e-cigarettes daily.

FDA - Only 1.6% of youth use e-cigarettes daily. 

So how does PAVE get this 25% number? Well, you might call it sleight-of-hand. It turns out that of youth e-cigarette users, more than 25% are daily users (26.3%). However, only 5.9% of youth are e-cigarette users, so the proportion of youth who are daily e-cigarettes users is 26.3% times 5.9%, which is 1.6%.

The truth is that PAVE is not telling the truth when they claim that more than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily. The truth is that 1 in 62 youth use e-cigarettes daily.

So why lie? 

Possibly it's because 1 in 4 youth sounds way more alarming than 1 in 62 youth. Somehow 1 in 62 youth doesn't quite have the same kick as 1 in 4. 

But why the need to lie in the first place? Possibly it's because the youth e-cigarette craze has subsided somewhat and the truthful statistics just aren't alarming enough to make youth vaping the kind of catastrophic problem that PAVE would like to promote it as.

The problem is that truth, honesty, and transparency are three important core values of public health. We do not misrepresent statistics in order to scare people. We do not provide false statistics to the public in order to increase public concern about public health problems. In other words, the ends of getting the public to take action do not justify the means of lying to or deceiving the public.