Twisting the Data to Blame Vaping Again

Alan Gor 28 July 2025

Becky Freeman and her co-authors are back with another paper trying to convince the public that vaping is to blame for slowing down the decline in youth smoking in Australia. But when you actually read their argument, one thing becomes clear:

This isn’t science — it’s spin.

1. Smoking Has Still Plummeted - And That Matters

The authors admit up front that youth smoking has continued to decline. That should be the headline. Instead, they say it didn’t fall as fast as they predicted. In other words, they created a model of how quickly they expected smoking to decline, and now they’re blaming vaping because reality didn’t match their guess.

That’s like saying a football team failed because they “only” won 4–1 instead of 5–0.

Between 1999 and 2022/23, all smoking behaviours among teens dropped dramatically:

• “Ever smoked” down from ~60% to 13%

• Daily smoking down to less than 1%

• Weekly smoking nearly vanished

That’s success. But instead of celebrating it, they blame vaping for not making the trend even steeper, as if that’s how science works.

2. Their Entire Argument Rests on a Model — Not on What Actually Happened

The study doesn’t show that youth smoking increased. It doesn’t even show that vaping causes smoking. What it does show is this:

A model they built predicts smoking would have declined faster, and since it didn’t, they assume vaping is the reason.

But modelling the future based on pre-2010 trends and blaming anything that deviates from that path is shaky at best.

Life changed dramatically after 2010:

• The rise of smartphones and social media

• Shifts in teen behaviour, anxiety, and drug use

• The explosion of illicit tobacco in Australia

• Changing social norms around smoking

Yet none of these are seriously explored. Instead, the paper zeroes in on vaping, treats it as the only variable that matters, and builds a convenient narrative around it.

That’s not public health. That’s advocacy dressed up as analysis.

3. The “Slowing Decline” is Statistically Weak and Practically Meaningless

Here’s one of their key claims:

“By 2022–23, about 13.2% of students had ever smoked. If the trend had continued from before 2010, it would’ve been 5.8%.”

Sounds like a big deal. Until you remember:

• “Ever smoked” includes a single puff.

• The difference is ~7% over 23 years — that’s ~0.3% per year.

• These are modelled estimates, not real-world measures.

They repeat this across several categories weekly, monthly, and daily smoking, but they’re all small differences based on projections, not actual trend reversals.

Nowhere do they prove causality. Nowhere do they show that vaping made smoking more attractive. They simply assume it.

4. They Misrepresent the “Gateway” Argument - Again

The authors say critics are wrong to expect vaping to cause a rise in smoking. They claim that if vaping leads to smoking, we’d expect a slowing of the decline, not a reversal.

But that’s moving the goalposts. For years, anti-vaping advocates warned that youth vaping would drive up smoking rates again, against a “gateway” effect.

It didn’t happen.

So now, they argue that even a slightly less steep decline proves the gateway theory. That’s not how science works. If anything, the data suggest vaping may be displacing smoking, especially among youth curious about nicotine.

5. Global Evidence Tells a Different Story

In the UK, the US, Sweden, and New Zealand, all countries where vaping became popular, youth smoking has continued to fall. In some cases, it’s fallen faster. Even in the 2018 US study, the authors tried to discredit the idea that accelerated smoking declines after vaping rose.

That contradicts their narrative.

In fact, the strongest evidence we have from real-world trends across multiple countries suggests that vaping may be a protective factor, not a risk factor.

6. Where’s Roy Morgan? Where’s AIHW?

Curiously, this study doesn’t mention Roy Morgan’s 2024–25 data, which found:

• A sharp increase in smoking among 18–24s after Australia’s vaping crackdown.

• More teens now smoke than vape, a reversal that coincides with the vape ban.

It also ignores AIHW’s 2022–23 data, which shows that:

• Youth smoking remains historically low.

• Most teen vapers do not smoke.

Why leave that out? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

Correlation ≠ Causation. And Vaping ≠ the Villain.

Freeman and her colleagues continue to push a one-dimensional message: vaping is bad, must be stopped. But the real world is more complex.

• Youth smoking is still falling.

• Vaping may be helping displace smoking.

• And Australia’s harsh anti-vaping policies have coincided with rising smoking among young adults and an explosion in black-market sales.

This latest paper doesn’t prove vaping caused harm. It just shows that if you build a model to blame vaping, it’s easy to “find” what you were looking for all along.

What public health needs right now is honesty, not more statistical gymnastics to justify a failing prohibition.