There're certain subjects that seem to turn people into drooling idiots. Those subjects often involve people enjoying themselves so we can at least construct some clues as to why the idiocy. Vaping seems to be one of those subjects. The basic point is really easy enough for anyone to understand: human beings rather like the effects of nicotine and vaping is about 5% as dangerous or less as a manner of ingesting nicotine as the other popular method, smoking tobacco. Being able to abolish 95% of the damage done to health by a product seems like a pretty good idea to us but there are those out there who disagree:

Legislators across the country are bringing bills to statehouses to raise the vaping age in line with the smoking age to a new high of 21 in some states. Politicians and public health activists argue e-cigarettes could hook kids on nicotine and lead to them to transition to tobacco and, therefore, need to be more tightly regulated.

It's obviously true that that is possible: but what we need to know is whether it is true. Is vaping a substitute or a complement to cigarette smoking?

“We should regulate tobacco products proportionate to their risks, and e-cigarette evidence suggests they’re less risky products,” said the Cornell study’s lead author Dr. Michael F. Pesko. “While there’s some risk, it would be a mistake to regulate them the same way we regulate cigarettes.”

The study backs up research published in 2015 showing the drive to ban the under 18s from buying and using e-cigarettes had the exact opposite effect that policy makers intended.

Smoking rates among 12-17-year-olds actually rose in states that banned e-cigarette sales to minors, according to the study by Abigail Friedman of the Yale School of Public Health, published in the Journal of Health Economics found.

“Such bans yield a statistically significant 0.9 percentage point increase in recent smoking in this age group, relative to states without such bans,” Friedman said. The study controlled for smoking rates within states and statewide cigarettes.

It's a substitute so far from making it more difficult, or taxing it more, if we're seriously concerned about human health we should be subsidising it.

In other news the European Union has started discussions on raising the taxation level on vaping to equal that on cigarettes. As we note, there's something about some subjects that just turn people into drooling idiots.