With restrictive vaping policies, efforts to curb cigarette use will go up in smoke

Remember the “epidemic” of underage nicotine vaping? For years, activists, politicians and public health officials have been warning that a surge in e-cigarette use by teenagers would hook a generation of young people on nicotine and encourage them to smoke. That never happened, as new federal survey data confirm. But policies adopted in response to that overblown threat continue to undermine the harm-reducing potential of vaping products by making them less attractive to current and former smokers.