This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 5th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The FDA today has officially broadened the definition of tobacco products to include e-cigarettes,

even though e-cigarettes are quite likely to be far safer than the traditional

kind. The decision could perhaps ironically lead many former smokers who currently use e-siggs to take up smoking again.

Terence Keeley is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a professor of

clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, we spoke today.

What are they relying on in saying that this is something good and proper to do?

Well, they're certainly relying on certain scientific papers, one of which I have in front of me here.

They're also relying on a general prejudice and a general public concern that vaping, as we call

it, e-cigarettescigarettes as can also be called, might actually be a

gateway rather than a closure to more dangerous activities such as cigarette

smoking. Okay so the study that that they rely on, what does it say?

Well, I have one of the seminal studies in front of me here

published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics a couple of years ago and

the title is electronic cigarettes and conventional cigarette use among U.S.

adolescents a cross-sectional study.

And it's very interesting if you read this paper it shows very clearly that

school children who smoke cigarettes are also more likely to smoke e-cigarettes.

And the way the paper is written, it is trying to push the reader of this paper into believing

that one might cause the other and particularly the

danger is that e-cigarettes might be causing conventional tobacco cigarette smoking.

That is how the paper is being written and that is how it has been

...