{"id":13859,"date":"2024-06-12T10:01:20","date_gmt":"2024-06-12T10:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/vaping-does-not-cause-teens-to-smoke-gateway-hypothesis-debunked\/"},"modified":"2025-01-06T16:38:49","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T16:38:49","slug":"vaping-does-not-cause-teens-to-smoke-gateway-hypothesis-debunked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/post\/vaping-does-not-cause-teens-to-smoke-gateway-hypothesis-debunked\/","title":{"rendered":"Vaping does not \u201ccause\u201d teens to smoke: gateway hypothesis debunked"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u2018gateway hypothesis\u2019 – that young people who vape are more likely to move on to more dangerous cigarettes – has long been cited as a reason to ban nicotine alternatives. <\/strong><\/p>\n

However, a new review of evidence<\/a> published in the Harm Reduction Journal concludes that vape use does NOT act as a gateway to teens taking up smoking. <\/p>\n

The study titled \u2018Gateway hypothesis: evaluation of evidence and alternative explanations\u2019 finds that anti-vape policies based on the gateway effect could in fact have the \u201cunintended consequence of increased cigarette smoking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Researcher Arielle Selya<\/a> writes: \u201cA major concern about ENDS [electronic nicotine delivery systems] use is the hypothesis that they may act as a gateway to cigarette smoking among youth. Evidence supporting this gateway explanation is based on findings that youth who use ENDS are also more likely to smoke cigarettes.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Selya says a more accurate interpretation of previous findings is that young people who are likely to vape are also<\/em> more likely to smoke cigarettes.<\/p>\n

An important flaw<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c..this evidence suffers from an important flaw,\u201d she writes. \u201cThese studies fail to fully account for some youths\u2019 pre-existing tendency to use nicotine products – either by not including sufficient common liability variables, or not accurately measuring<\/em> common liability – and inappropriately interpret the results as ENDS use causing<\/em> some youth to smoke.\u201d<\/p>\n

The review finds that vaping and smoking trends are \u201cinconsistent with the gateway hypothesis\u201d and in fact point to vapes \u201cdisplacing cigarettes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Selya says: \u201cPolicies based on misinterpreting a causal gateway effect may be ineffective at best, and risk the negative unintended consequence of increased cigarette smoking.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The report says that based on the more likely \u201ccommon liability explanation,\u201d where vaping youths have a pre-existing tendency to use nicotine products, the case against ENDs is weakened \u201cto the point where, in some studies, ENDS use poses no additional risks\u201d<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Selya adds: \u201cDifferent lines of evidence also contradict the gateway explanation and support the common liability explanation, namely population-trend modelling studies that show smoking to be less common among youth now, than would be expected if ENDS had never become available.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis raises the question about whether ENDS are diverting<\/em> youth away from ever smoking cigarettes, which is an important area for future research.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u2018gateway hypothesis\u2019 – that young people who vape are more likely to move on to more dangerous cigarettes – has long been cited as a reason to ban nicotine alternatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":990002,"featured_media":13865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[257],"tags":[],"slider":[],"class_list":["post-13859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/990002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13859"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18154,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13859\/revisions\/18154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13859"},{"taxonomy":"slider","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/slider?post=13859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}