ALIVE WITH PLEASURE: Why Vaping Isn’t a ‘Gateway’ to Smoking.

There are ways to minimize the initiation of risky behaviors, but prohibiting one product in hopes of decreasing the use of another should not be one of them. At best, doing so directs time and energy away from a better solution. At worst, people who would otherwise benefit from the reduced harm posed by the alleged gateway product – like e-cigarettes – are put at risk of relapsing to a more dangerous product – like their combustible counterparts.

Unfortunately, we are not deprived of misleading research that threatens to steer users away from reduced-harm products, like e-cigarettes, and toward readily available yet more dangerous tobacco products. A slew of studies have recently concluded that e-cigarette use is a gateway to combustible cigarette use in teens, and one study in particular concludes that kids who use e-cigarettes are seven times more likely to use combustible cigarettes when compared to kids who don’t use e-cigarettes.

Read the whole thing. But understand that vaping gets a bad rap because Big Tobacco has to deal with upstart competitors, and politicians aren’t getting their cut.