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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the American Vaping Association, a leading advocate for the benefits of vapor products such as electronic cigarettes, reacted to the release of new 2014 survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS). As was the case with prior NYTS surveys, as well as 2014 data from the Monitoring the Future survey, the survey finds that that as youth experimentation with vaping has grown, teen smoking has declined at a rate faster than ever before.
Gregory Conley, President of the American Vaping Association, issued the following statement:
“The data is clear. As teen experimentation with vaping has grown over the last three years, youth smoking has experienced the largest decline in the history of the NYTS survey. This dramatic fall in teen smoking should be part of the conversation, but the CDC deemed this finding to not be worthy of any substantive discussion in their press release. That is not surprising, as it would interfere with the CDC’s evidence-free attempts to paint e-cigarettes as a potential gateway to traditional cigarettes.”
“While no vaping or smoking by teens is obviously the ideal, we do not live in a perfect world. There remains no evidence that e-cigarettes are acting as gateway products for youth. In fact, this study and others suggest that the availability of vapor products has acted as a deterrent for many teenagers and potentially kept them away from traditional cigarettes.
Dr. Michael Siegel, a longtime anti-smoking advocate and Professor of Public Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, issued the following statement (read the statement in full):
“It appears that rather than serving as a gateway toward cigarette smoking, e-cigarettes may actually be acting as a diversion away from cigarettes. Perhaps the most important finding of the new report is that despite the dramatic increase in e-cigarette use among youth, the prevalence of smoking among youth has fallen dramatically during the same time period.
“Among high school students, while current use of e-cigarettes increased from 1.5% in 2011 to 13.4% in 2014, current use of real cigarettes declined from 15.8% to 9.2%. Moreover, the prevalence of overall tobacco use among youth has remained steady during this time period, both among high school and middle school students.
“These data do not support, and in fact, help to refute the CDC’s assertions that e-cigarettes are a gateway to cigarette smoking among youth. These new data are simply not consistent with such a conclusion. Moreover, the data suggest the opposite. The data suggest that overall tobacco use among youth is not changing, but the form of that use is shifting dramatically: away from combustible cigarettes and towards non-tobacco-containing and much safer electronic cigarettes.”
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