{"id":44173,"date":"2018-07-17T05:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T09:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44173"},"modified":"2018-07-16T18:08:52","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T22:08:52","slug":"juul-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/17\/juul-threat\/","title":{"rendered":"Juul threat"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Tierney<\/a> on the good news\/bad news in the most recent smoking statistics in the United States:<\/p>\n

Tobacco-company stocks have plunged this year \u2014 along with cigarette sales \u2014 because of a wonderful trend: the percentage of people smoking has fallen to a historic low. For the first time, the smoking rate in America has dropped below 15 percent for adults and 8 percent for high school students. But instead of celebrating this trend, public-health activists are working hard to reverse it.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve renewed their campaign against the vaping industry and singled out Juul Labs, the maker of an e-cigarette so effective at weaning smokers from their habit that Wall Street analysts are calling it an existential threat to tobacco companies. In just a few years, Juul has taken over more than half the e-cigarette market thanks to its innovative device, which uses replaceable snap-on pods containing a novel liquid called nicotine salt. Because the Juul\u2019s aerosol vapor delivers nicotine more quickly than other vaping devices, it feels more like a tobacco cigarette, so it appeals to smokers who want nicotine\u2019s benefits (of which there are many) without the toxins and carcinogens in tobacco smoke.<\/p>\n

It clearly seems to be the most effective technology ever developed for getting smokers to quit, and there\u2019s no question that it\u2019s far safer than tobacco cigarettes. But activists are so determined to prohibit any use of nicotine that they\u2019re calling Juul a \u201cmassive public-health disaster\u201d and have persuaded journalists, Democratic politicians, and federal officials to combat the \u201cJuuling epidemic\u201d among teenagers.<\/p>\n

The press has been scaring the public with tales of high schools filled with nicotine fiends desperately puffing on Juuls, but the latest federal survey, released last month, tells a different story. The vaping rate last year among high-school students, a little less than 12 percent, was actually four percentage points lower than in 2015, when Juul was a new product with miniscule sales. As Juul sales soared over the next two years, the number of high-school vapers declined by more than a quarter, and the number of middle-school vapers declined by more than a third \u2014 hardly the signs of an epidemic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Tierney on the good news\/bad news in the most recent smoking statistics in the United States: Tobacco-company stocks have plunged this year \u2014 along with cigarette sales \u2014 because of a wonderful trend: the percentage of people smoking has fallen to a historic low. For the first time, the smoking rate in America has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,15,13],"tags":[174,322,244,661,290,504],"class_list":["post-44173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-technology","category-usa","tag-innovation","tag-nannystate","tag-publichealth","tag-regulation","tag-statistics","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-but","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44174,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44173\/revisions\/44174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}