Point of View: Vapes, are they the New Cigarette?

Intro: [music] Welcome back to The Daily Utah Chronicle's opinion podcast. I'm your host, Estella Weeks, and you're listening to Point of View.Estella Weeks: E-cigarette usage among college students is on the rise. About 24% of students use them, but we can assume that number is much, much higher. The tobacco consumption boom between the 1920s and 1960s has left that generation with severe health concerns. I'm here with Dr Ryan, a cardiologist with the University of Utah Health, and my question for you, Dr Ryan, is history repeating itself, and is vaping the new cigarettes?Dr. Ryan: I think the concern that we all have is that vaping might lead to the new cigarettes. Vaping, in and of itself, has some consequences. But when you talk about cigarettes, obviously you're talking about in particular things like emphysema and chronic obstructive lung disease or COPD, and then obviously lung cancer in particular. And those, the risks of those really are massively increased by cigarette smoking. But the concern, in particular, with vaping is not necessarily well, part of it is damage associated with vaping, but the other part of it, as I said, is that it may lead to cigarette consumption, to cigarette use. And what's important is that there is no safe level of nicotine use. There is also no necessity for nicotine use. So people, for example, may challenge. They'll say, 'Oh well, you know, [a] can of Coke is more, you know, or drinking lots of Coke is more, Coca Cola is much more, you know, damaging to your health, than vaping' something along those lines. But that might be true if you're drinking 20 cans of Coke for you and for you know, college students, you can absolutely have a can of Coke, it's going to be just fine, but you should not vape. Things will not be just fine from vaping, or in reality, also, I mean nicotine supplements. So I'll see, Zin in particular is popular right now, and kind of other kind of, you know, I will just say, trendy ways of consuming nicotine. The issue in particular is that at some stage that people, what we know from the science is that people will evolve from using nicotine supplements, such as in or or vaping, and then advance onto cigarette smoking to frank cigarette smoking. The other concern that people have is that it may not actually, it has not been shown at all, or at least convincingly, that using vaping instead of smoking, so one of the arguments being, is that, well, 'my uncle used to smoke, he got lung disease, now he vapes, and now he's going to do much, much better.' There's no real convincing evidence to show that that decreases the risk of people going back to smoking, because again, this is not kind of done under medical monitoring. It's not done under the supervision of you know physicians or nurses, etc, or counselors or psychologists or something along those lines. It's independently done as vaping. The question about independently and for for your your colleagues who will say, Oh, well, I'm never going to smoke, first of all, all of us say we're never going to smoke. And but for your colleagues who say, I'm never going to smoke, the vaping, in and of itself, does have health consequences. So when you do use the nicotine, and this is why I said earlier on Estella that there is no safe or beneficial level of nicotine consumption, because nicotine, in...