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Thanks for the link. If I'm understanding this correctly, we could say that _actual_ tobacco use by minors has decrease by roughly half in 7 years, with a slight over all increase in nicotine use by minors. This sounds like an improvement to me. Also, categorization of e-cigarettes as tobacco products, and the way that their use rate in minors is not explicitly reported separately from tobacco seems incoherent if not suspicious to me. If reporting actual rate of e-cigarette use were one's real goal, it would make far more sense to report it _alone_ instead of combined with tobacco. Tobacco and smoking cessation products are effectively regulated cartels. I quit smoking years ago, using nicotine patches, which I noticed were made by GlaxoSmithKline. Other nicotine delivery vehicles seemed strangely un-competive considering that nicotine is cheap enough to spray as an insecticide. Generics existed, but they were hard to buy and surprisingly inferior. I belive these are regulated medical products and subject to patent; at any rate, I only ever saw generic nic patches at Wal-mart, and they were bad to use, and still pretty expensive. So for practical purposes it cost $100-$200 a month for patches, about the same as a few cartons of cigarettes. These products always had a peculiar way of costing a just a little more then a similar supply of cigarettes, even as the price/tax regime of tobacco changed by an integer factor over time and space. If I recall correctly, GSK turned out to own shares in Altria (might have been the other way around?). In so far as E-cigarettes are a threat to incumbents, I would expect them to lobby aggressively to have them similarly regulated, taxed, and finally, priced. I suspect this is at least partly behind the sensation and obfuscated statistics surrounding vape use. I know first hand that nicotine is viciously addictive. One of the reasons I quit is that I knew I was being farmed. Consider that Altria is famed as "dividend aristocrat". I would expect an aggressive campaign to prevent disruption of that market, or fold it into the extant cartel. |