Vaping, Smoking, and the Urban Myth

A tabloid article says vaping is worse than smoking—is it?

The street drug Ecstasy, it turns out, does not drain your spinal fluid. This will be news to Beth, my high school classmate who offered a detailed explanation of how her friend’s friend died precisely that way.

Also, mixing Coke and Pop Rocks in one’s mouth does not, I have learned, immediately blow one’s head off. Mason, the 5th grade friend who alerted me to this danger, will be so relieved.

Furthermore, I have been informed that holding one’s breath while passing a cemetery, then saying the word ‘rabbit’ seven times, does not add a year to one’s life. My cousin Nikos’ buddy may have been mistaken.

However, people who vape “will be horrified to know the truth” that vaping is as deadly as smoking. That’s according to a news piece about a news piece about a guy who, totally, did a (kind of) study about it.

There are many reasons to doubt information, especially when it arrives in the style of an urban myth, like an article this week in the hilariously un-serious New York Post. For starters, the Post did impressive background and investigative work: Their self-admitted information source for the story was. . . the UK’s Daily Mirror, another trashy tabloid. The Post literally lifted the entire story—quotes and all.

Journalism!

The original Daily Mirror piece reports an “astonishing breakthrough” from a researcher in Manchester who claims to have done a study of exercise tolerance in 20 adult smokers, 20 vapers, and 20 people who do neither. The breakthrough finding? The vaping and smoking groups were more fatigued and breathless than the group that did neither. Eureka!

Conclusion: Vaping is as dangerous as smoking tobacco (and maybe worse).

A few notes. First, vapers and smokers are different from each other, and different from people who do neither. Different lives, interests, jobs, cultures, habits, and lifestyles. The notion that all differences (or similarities) in exercise fitness are caused exclusively by their chosen nicotine source is preposterous, and embarrassingly unscientific. Also notable, most vapers used to be smokers (that’s why they vape). Therefore depending on how recently they smoked, their lungs ARE smoker lungs. Shocker: the two groups might be similar.

But there’s a far bigger problem here than bad methods and brainless inference: The complete absence of scientific process. There is, as of now, no journal that published these ‘findings’. Because there’s no study report. No manuscript, no description, nothing. Not even a ‘pre-print’. In other words there has been no peer review of the study, or its claims, or its data—no editing, no checks on the math or methods, no outside input, and no assessment of validity.

That ain’t science.

Basically, the Mirror and Post are reporting gossip from an excitable (and unscrupulous) researcher. Why would they do such a thing? Because both outlets are credulous, clickbaiting tabloids with no interest in vetting the ‘science’ they claim to report. Instead they gleefully fearmonger for money.

So what is the truth about the risks of vaping?

Large evidence reviews and government reports have been unable to find a shred of evidence linking vaping—the inhalation of heated water, nicotine, and flavor elements—to any human disease. There are studies detecting trace amounts of chemical byproducts in people that may, theoretically, herald long term risks. But human bodies deal with foreign substances constantly, and there’s simply no data showing a link to illness or injury with marketed vaping products.

Which is, importantly, not proof of safety. There have been cases of lung injury from illicit vape fluids, and there are weird reports of massive overdose. But crucially, e-cigarettes also remain the most effective intervention ever studied for helping people quit smoking.

And smoking is real real bad—this is not disputed. In a classic 1950 study researchers Doll and Hill found that among 647 men they interviewed with lung cancer, 645 had been smokers (!!!). Even with smoking rates as high as 40-50% in the population at the time, 99.7% was a true breakthrough finding. And of course hundreds of studies followed, confirming smoking causes lung (and many other) cancers as well as heart disease, lung disease, strokes, and almost everything else bad.

With vaping it’ll be decades before we can be certain, but twenty years into the experiment it’s safe to say that if e-cigarettes do carry long term risks, they’re not remotely as bad as the multitude of fatal and disabling ailments caused by smoking tobacco.

Translating research can often be tricky and nuanced. Fortunately, outlets like the New York Post sometimes make it easier, by reporting on scientifically bankrupt gossip and calling it research.

Anyway. Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.

Just in case.