Why People Are Dying from Vaping in the U.S. and Not the U.K.
There's a reason—actually, a few—and none of them are very flattering to American politicians.
Whenever Matt Culley travels to England, he feels as if he has entered a sort of Twilight Zone.
A prominent vaping advocate on YouTube in the United States, Culley went so far as to describe the scene in the United Kingdom, where he often attends conferences, as a sort of "alternate reality."
Imagine: You're visiting a loved one in the hospital, and after popping into the cafeteria to eat a premade bologna sandwich or Jell-o, you're jonesing for a cigarette. Smoking, however, has been prohibited in or around the place—even in your car. You're out of e-juice, too. But that's not a problem: You're at the hospital, after all, and you can just run into the vape shop attached to it.
That scenario may sound absurd, but it's plausible in England, where, in July, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals actually agreed to allow a vape company to open stores on their property. The hope was that it would discourage people from smoking cigarettes outside.
"Meanwhile, in the U.S., now you have people going to vape shops and telling the owners that they're killing people," Culley said. "It's crazy."
Although experts canvassed by VICE acknowledged the U.K. is in no way immune to nicotine-related health problems, the American vaping crisis that has produced at least 1,000 cases of illness and roughly two-dozen deaths is pretty much nonexistent over there. There also appears to be far less official concern that vaping is a gateway drug sucking otherwise uninterested teens into a lifetime of nicotine use. Without lobbyists killing oversight and 1990s-style drug war hysteria hamstringing policy, U.K. officials have produced a piecemeal regulatory system that carefully monitors nicotine levels in vape products.
The stark contrast has American harm-reduction advocates and their counterparts across the pond touting the U.K.'s measured approach to vaping as more logical than the full-throttle panic in Washington and state capitals across the country. The only problem is American institutions seem ill-equipped to emulate it.
"I think the difference between the U.K. and the U.S. are due to the American propensity to turn health issues into moral crusades," said Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville and an expert in tobacco-addiction harm-reduction, who also noted that another big issue is the bureaucratic mess in obtaining funding for research in the States. "It appears that policymakers in the U.S. are either completely ignorant of the history of tobacco, or completely ignore it."