Vaping in kids had its day. While useful before and since for smoking cessation and harm reduction in cigarette smokers, vaping only became a fad in teens when, as predicted, social authoritarians in the Obama administration declared it an epidemic - if on a survey a young person claimed to have tried one in the previous year and began rolling out commercials of children filmed in black and white looking like zombies.(1) 

It was Reefer Madness for the 2010s and did the same thing Reefer Madness did; it caused teens to think it was cool to outrage their elders.

The government created an agency regulation that acted as a law without the public or Congress being involved (2) and banned about 10,000 products and said they were sticking it to Big Tobacco. Except the regulation they created made approval for vaping products so expensive the only companies that could get approval for vaping products was...Big Tobacco. One company, Juul, exploited the fad and rocketed to such heights that it got a big influx of cash from...wait for it, Big Tobacco...before crashing and burning. Hysteria about vaping devices causing "popcorn" lung and nicotine being just as harmful as the actual carcinogens in cigarette smoke were repeated by the same clueless corporate media groups that claim today that chocolate reduces risk of diabetes.


When the Obama administration went on its vendetta, those in actual public health outreach suggested we not demonize the product to save a few kids per year. And it was only a few. The number of "nicotine-naive" people who took up vaping and then switched to cigarettes was so small it was meaningless. You could more easily blame organic food for causing cigarette users.(3)

Basically, we didn't want the government doing to smokers trying to quit what they did to cancer patients who need pain medication - be so intent on promoting a corporate conspiracy that they harmed hundreds of thousands while claiming to save them from predatory Big Pharma corporations. The same Big Pharma that saved us during COVID-19.

Luckily, thanks to groups like ours who have opposed smoking and showed the harms since our inception, smoking has continued to decline. And vaping is no longer a fad for young people. The decline is so persistent the Biden administration is now taking credit for it, despite doing nothing except spending money on expensive broadcast TV ad campaigns no young people watch.



Obviously when it comes to public health and kids, it doesn't matter who gets the credit, but an overstuffed government agency saying they won a war they were created in 2009 to start isn't adding to trust in government health experts.

NOTES:

(1) Then they added cigars and pipes to the list of cancer-causing smoking causes even though you don't inhale them, which every non-partisan epidemiologist called "statistical wobble."Which means you can get data to confess to anything if you torture it long enough. Coin flips can be prejudiced against heads. Or tails. Claiming that someone who smokes 25 cigars a day is at greater risk of mouth cancer ignored that they were at the same risk of harm if they brushed their teeth 25 times per day. Or 25 lollipops. The compulsion creates the risk, not the cigar. Pipes were an even sillier thing to lump in. While Obama was not as great an enemy of science as President Clinton, he was certainly no friend.

(2) Chevron Deference needed to be ended long before the Biden administration abused it so badly a fisherman - you read that right - stuck with the cost of a government observer that the boat had to pay to have getting in the way took it to the Supreme Court, where it was finally eliminated.

(3) Smoking was in decline and it was in large because because vaping worked about twice as well as Big Pharma products like gums and patches. The reason seems obvious to anyone who understands behavior. The closer you come to the mechanism of smoking while people quit cigarettes the better. Vaping felt more like a replacement than a gum or patch.