E-Cigarettes & Data-Driven Policy

Public health drama! San Francisco insists that e-cigarettes prove safety before selling to residents. Ban goes into effect today.

Image from Alex Castro in The Verge article on E-Cigarette Bans

I know what you are thinking, WHAT? We thought e-cigarettes were safe? But actually, no really there isn't much evidence to show if e-cigs are healthier, same-as, or worse than tobacco. And the FDA has only begun to start enforcing safety standards. (The government is slower than tech, we know this).

Given that there are thousands of different e-juices with different flavor compounds, and hundreds of different devices at different flashpoints it's going to be a LONG time before we have any kind of controlled data to show longitudinal e-cigarette effects as compared to tobacco.

It took 20 years to really prove tobacco was bad for us, and that was with the help of data from secret tobacco files created by manufacturers who knew long before public health researchers that it caused cancer.

In case we forget, tobacco is the worlds leading cause of preventable death and disease and kills about 1 billion people a year. While we WANT e-cigarettes to be better, we try to make policy decisions based on data not hope — let's get some data!

#todreamalife #preventivemedicine #vaping #publichealth #datadrivenpolicy #evidencebasedpolicy