Attitudes towards E-Cigarettes

We all know that attitudes towards e-cigarettes are slowly being eroded in the UK by the near constant barrage of churnalism. That’s right The Sun I’m looking squarely at you, crass fuckwits that you are. I might even look towards _The Telegraph _too. Not for the usual reason of their “science” editor this time, though that could be considered one big reason.

Now we have an actual study, funded by the National Cancer Institute and the FDA CTP, and performed by some researchers deep in the bowels of Stanford. Well, we know how the last one turned out don’t we?

Well this one is examining the attitudes of adolescents towards e-cigarettes. No doubt in the hopes of finding a way to erode public confidence even further. The introduction doesn’t bode well.

Well, not much to really say here except perhaps they should really read the data being published by the CDC where it is pretty damn clear that the use of combustible tobacco is in rapid decline. Even more than that, the MTF survey also reports that over half of teen e-cigarette users don’t in fact use nicotine. As for citing Barrington-Trimis, well I’ve written about her before. She’s one that will regurgitate data in new, and useless ways to fit a particular narrative.

May as well just come out and say it people. Folks think that e-cigarettes are a good thing despite your continued attempts to consider them “as harmful as tobacco”. Otherwise, how do you explain the continued slush fund directed at useless “research” such as this? (or any of the other well documented “research” on this humble blog)

The rest of the introduction is pretty standard fare with the caveat of “no substantial research done in this area” but you can already tell which way these researchers are leaning can’t you? Ideology doesn’t belong in science, yet you can find it prevalent in all walks of “public health science”.

So. Let me get this straight. Tobacco control don’t want teens to know about e-cigarettes, yet here are some public health researchers talking to the very same teenagers about e-cigarettes. Just can’t make it up! But of course, it’s OK when they do it (huge thanks to master blogger Dick Puddlecote for that one). Even worse is that 4,000 impressionable youth were ‘exposed’ to e-cigarettes just so these researchers could do a study, did they not for a second think of the potential consequences of such an action? Well of course not, you see, indoctrinating the youth is all part of this game for these researchers. They want a never-ending supply of impressionable youth so they can convince those in some semblance of power that The Children™ are at risk, which will of course mean Orwellian measures to keep the Proles in line.

But I digress. Out of those 4,000 impressionable young Proles, only 32% of those that “learned about the study” which is a fairly poor performance by normal standards, but this is for tobacco control so if only 10% returned signed forms it’s still all systems go. A further 405 were withdrawn, leaving 786 impressionable young minds for these researchers to indoctrinate. I’m not concerned about the fundamental demographics, but I did find it interesting that more females responded than males – but then, men are more likely to ignore such studies anyway – especially the young ones. Incorrigible little grunts they are.

Curiously, the number of smokers among the 786 was only 38, 87 had only used e-cigarettes, 57 had used both while the rest didn’t use either. Of course, the “use” question was slanted, as it always is in US research:

Other questions included the perceptions of others using e-cigarettes/cigarettes – specifically parents, siblings and friends – to “evaluate how many teens out of 100 who were the same age, gender and ethnicity were using e-cigarettes/cigarettes”; this is the infamous “peer pressure” type question meant to try and lend credence to the statement “if parents smoke/vape, kids will think it’s OK to do it to”. These people are so far removed from reality it can hardly be called a joke anymore.

In which the scale is of course a four point scale – strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree – with only the extreme measurements being used by the media as “evidence of fact”. That’s how it works.

Ah of course. This is all about possible policy options that the researchers have been “guided” to investigate. Which of course include the usual suspects:

• Raising taxes on e-cigarettes or cigarettes
• Regulations
• Age restrictions
• Indoor space restrictions
• Outdoor space restrictions
• General accessibility of the product

You get the idea. Of course, the fact that it’s The Children™ answering these questions lends a lot more weight to the sock puppet organisations in the US that claim “our kids want” doesn’t it? Nasty hobbitses.

Analysis (theirs, not mine!)

As with any US study, if you so much as take a single puff of a cigarette or an e-cigarette you are classed as an “ever user” – you only get moved up to “current user” if you did so in the last 30 days, even if that was your one and only puff. These scientists politicians.

Interestingly, the perceived prevalence lends some credence to the “peer pressure” theorem, though as we’ve seen before it’s more a social dynamic than peer pressure. Especially if those “ever users” are in fact former smokers (which I suspect some of the participants in this study were, though it isn’t clear).

Knowledge & attitudes

This is the part of the results I’ve been waiting for. This is where the grandiose claim of “adolescents harbor misperceptions, including believing that e-cigs are safer than cigarettes” comes from. It does also highlight a rather worrying knowledge gap of our own which will be difficult to fill.

The devil is in the details here. Users of e-cigarettes are more likely to agree that e-cigarettes don’t contain TAR, aren’t a tobacco product, don’t produce smoke, feel cleaner, safer than smoking and help people quit smoking. These users also agree that e-cigarettes just produce water [vapor]. On the flip side, the non-users were more likely to agree that e-cigarette vapour is dangerous to babies and children. It is clear from the discussion of this section that the researchers got the data they needed:

It gets better.

In the discussion:

It’s pretty clear that these researchers are bewildered by the seeming positive attitudes towards e-cigarettes and their use where smoking is prohibited. After all, research has given them all the right answers to impose draconian measures that has led to a number of public places being closed down – an intended consequence I might add.

I’ll bet this annoyed them:

I do wonder how that kind of attitude in those kids will be in a few years time after being bombarded with mainstream media nonsense.

Well no shit sherlock.

Good grief! These kids have just handed an excuse for legislators to raise taxes to raise revenue persuade smokers to quit. A fact that the researchers were obviously quick to pick up on:

Well we know what the whole Tobacco21 thing is about don’t we?

Don’t you just love it when researchers unwittingly admit that the anti-tobacco laws have never really been about health?

Cue the veiled “proposal”:

The only misconception here is the fact that anyone with a grain of sense would give this “study” any credence, or even call it “science”.

But then, this crusade by the US public health industry has never been about health. It’s been about money. Money and control.

(image credit – Dawn Gilfillan/shutterstock.com)