The 2014 Minnesota Youth Tobacco Survey found that the percent of high school students who smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days dropped from 18.1 percent in 2011 to 10.6 percent in 2014. This decline in cigarette smoking represented the steepest ever recorded by the Minnesota youth survey. The official release by the MN officials credits their extensive efforts to curb cigarette smoking, including a 2013 tobacco tax, bans on indoor smoking, and tighter restrictions on youth access to tobacco products.
For the first time, the survey also asked about e-cigarette use and found that 12.9 percent of high school students used or tried an electronic cigarette in the past 30 days. The survey found that 28 percent of high school students reported ever having tried an e-cigarette.
"These new findings indicate that our statewide efforts to reduce and prevent conventional tobacco use among Minnesota children are working," said Minnesota Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Ed Ehlinger. "At the same time, we are seeing a wild-west approach toward e-cigarettes, which allows tobacco companies unlimited marketing access to young men and women. This has led to increasing numbers of Minnesota high school and middle school students using e-cigarettes."
And there you have it, in a nutshell. There are simply none so blind as those who just will not see, and that characterizes many of the so-called public health experts and local politicians and regulators who just won t add 2+2 and come up with 4. Nope, they d rather worry about the wild west of e-cigarettes and the exposure to our youth from tobacco companies. Over and over, we see these ignorant, ideologically-bound, or corrupt individuals linking e-cigs to Big Tobacco, or failing to read the handwriting on the wall: as e-cig use, even experimentation, goes up, the rate of addiction to deadly, toxic cigarettes goes down. These new data clearly illustrate this phenomenon: the spokesman seeks hither and yon for some explanation as to how/why the teen smoking rate fell so much, and simultaneously bemoans the increased use of e-cigs. If he could take a step back, he might see that these phenomena are linked!
