More unintended consequences

Gizmodo reports:

A 2018 ban on flavored tobacco products in San Francisco may have had some unintended consequences, new research this week suggests. The study found that high school teens were more likely to take up smoking after the ban than those living elsewhere.

We may see the same thing happen here as officials seem determined to treat vaping the same as smoking.

In 2018, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to enact a wholesale ban on flavored tobacco products, following a voter-passed measure. This ban included products like menthol cigarettes, as well as all flavored e-cigarette or vaping devices, and extended to all retailers, including dedicated vape shops. At the time, many public health organizations such as the American Heart Association supported the ban, while tobacco companies funded a $12 million ad campaign against it.

Proponents have argued that these flavor bans will make tobacco products less appealing to children and young adults, thus preventing them from ever picking up any nicotine habit. Yet in recent years, some drug policy and harm reduction experts have started to wonder if these sorts of bans could be counterproductive, especially when it comes to vaping devices. The argument is that these bans will drive some people who would have only ever vaped to instead keep using or switch to cigarettes entirely. And while e-cigarettes aren’t entirely risk-free, their harms do appear to be significantly smaller than other tobacco products.

The new study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, seems to suggest that this exact scenario has played out as feared among high school students in San Francisco.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Vaping is not good for you but smoking is deadly, so policy that makes iot harder for people to move from smoking to vaping will lead to more smokers.’

Before the ban, trends in smoking among high school students were pretty similar across different cities, Friedman found, with kids reportedly smoking less and less over time. But afterward, there was a clear difference between San Francisco and other places. Namely, rates of reported smoking in San Francisco seemed to rise but continued to drop elsewhere. Friedman estimated that 6.2% of high school students there smoked in 2019, compared to 2.8% of students in other cities. And when adjusting for smoking trends across all these cities, she estimated that the odds of high school students smoking in San Francisco more than doubled following the ban.

Well done liberal law makers in San Francisco.