This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 22nd,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The war on smoking has transitioned,

it seems, almost seamlessly into a war on vaping in other countries and increasingly

in the U.S. despite evidence that many people use vaping to quit the far more harmful cigarettes.

Cato's Jeff Singer details the predictable consequences.

For a long time, people didn't really know how bad smoking was for them.

I mean, they had ideas ideas and at least since 1964 the Surgeon

General making a big to-do about the dangers associated with smoking cigarettes.

Enter vaping. with smoking cigarettes, enter vaping, which by all accounts is

dramatically less harmful probably than smoking cigarettes, and now we're seeing the war on vaping. So what do you

make of the I don't know the prohibitionist tendency among public officials when it comes to this new technology of vaping.

It's really difficult to make sense out of it. I think a lot of it might have to do with just this visceral distaste for anything

that resembles the act of smoking tobacco. So recently the government of Australia started a new program where nobody is permitted to get any vaping equipment unless they get a

prescription from a physician. That's the only way vaping is allowed in Australia, which on

one hand it sort of implicitly accepts the fact that vaping is a harm reduction tool

for people wishing to quit tobacco smoke and it's a proven effective one.

So effective in fact that in the UK primary care providers are encouraged by the

National Health Service and they have brochures in their office to tell tobacco smokers

have you considered switching to vaping?

And they provide them with information on how to do that.

In Australia, that's the only way you could vape.

But of course, vaping a much safer and pleasurable act than then smoking is it's

...