Freakonomics Radio
The Truth About the Vaping Crisis
A recent outbreak of illness and death has gotten everyone’s attention — including late-to-the-game regulators. But would a ban on e-cigarettes do more harm than good? We smoke out the facts.
Unless you’ve been hibernating, you’ve probably heard about the dangers posed by e-cigarettes and vaping. Forty-two people in the United States have died and 2,000 have been injured in cases involving a severe respiratory ailment called EVALI, or “e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury.”
People have been vaping for years, but the deaths are new. The epidemic has been met with something between alarm and panic. The reaction is understandable. More than 40 million people around the world now vape, up from just 7 million less than a decade ago. In the United States, roughly one in five high school kids vape.
The U.S. government is now trying to beat back the tide of vaping, but there’s another country that’s been encouraging it. Regulators in the U.K. have embraced e-cigarettes; they view vaping as an effective means of helping smokers quit cigarettes. Unlike the United States, however, the U.K. doesn’t have a youth vaping problem, nor have there…
