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In other words, it’s entirely possible that young people who are predisposed to trying cigarettes — perhaps out of rebelliousness, or a disregard of risk (and perhaps drugs and alcohol, too) — are also likely to try e-cigarettes. The real question is not whether teenagers experiment with both tobacco products and e-cigarettes, but whether the advent of e-cigarettes is causing an increase in smoking rates among youth. And the research has consistently shown that this is not the case.

In a perfect world, teens would not experiment with either product

Indeed, while the aforementioned study did find that the number of young people who had tried e-cigarettes in the past 30 days increased during the period in question, it also found that the overall number of youths who had smoked a cigarette in the past month decreased. The latest National Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, also found that the number of American high-school students who had smoked a cigarette in the month prior to the survey decreased from 16 per cent in 2011, to eight per cent in 2016. At the same time, students who had tried vaping increased from 1.5 per cent in 2011, to 16 per cent in 2015, but fell to 11 per cent in 2016.

Although we have no way of knowing how much smoking rates would have decreased if vaping was not an option, it’s fairly clear that e-cigarettes have not caused an increase in tobacco use. As tobacco researcher Riccardo Polosa and his co-authors wrote in Harm Reduction Journal in June, “the increasing prevalence of e-cigarette use between 2010 and 2015 has coincided with the sharpest declines in the smoking rate among U.S. youth and young adults on record.” That’s something to celebrate.