What You Need to Know About the E-cigarette ban Advocated by a Controversial Tobacco Scientist

Stanton Glantz is one of the few scientists who has battled smoking as fiercely as he has.

Glantz led campaigns to ban smoking in public places, exposed secret tobacco industry documents, and wrote or co-wrote five books and nearly 400 papers, the majority of which documented the harm caused by tobacco.

Glantz was a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the founding director of its Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

Cigarette corporations detested him, and he despised them back.

Glantz once declared, “I’d like to just kill the tobacco industry.”

“It’s a business that claims the lives of 5 million people every year. It has no right to exist. Make them do something productive.”

Many of Glantz’s previous allies have turned on the 75-year-old scientist in recent years, as a fierce dispute over electronic cigarettes has splintered the tobacco research community.

His detractors accuse him of emphasizing the risks of e-cigarettes while downplaying their advantages.

His research into vaping is said to have been motivated by politics rather than science.

Some are even raising doubts about his earlier work, claiming that his disdain for tobacco companies,

His groundbreaking research revealing the risks of secondhand smoke was marred by his campaigning against them.

The harshest criticism is that Glantz has become an unsuspecting partner of the tobacco business, according to these critics.

According to David Sweanor, a long-time anti-smoking campaigner, he has become one of “Big Tobacco’s little assistants.”

How is that possible? It arises from the notion that e-cigarettes are safer than combustible tobacco, which is shared by many tobacco researchers but not by Glantz.

(However, scientists dispute how much safer it is.) Many well-known researchers—but, once again,

E-cigarettes—not Glantz—are likewise thought to help smokers stop by delivering regular doses of nicotine in a way that won’t kill them.

Glantz and his anti-tobacco partners, the non-profit advocacy groups Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the Truth Initiative, are among the most important figures in the anti-tobacco movement.

Bloomberg Philanthropies has invested $160 million in a campaign against e-cigarettes, which includes the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society.

Rather than encouraging smokers to convert to vaping, Glantz and the NGOs have pushed for more traditional quitting methods, such as the use of FDA-approved pharmaceuticals.

Simultaneously, they are attempting to ban e-cigarettes, tax them, prohibit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, prohibit their use in smoke-free zones, and do everything they can to prevent adults and children from vaping.

Glantz has claimed that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking, that they do not assist smokers in quitting, and that they increase the risk of heart attacks.

All of them have been called into question, and one of the most influential studies has been retracted.

However, because Glantz’s work has been highlighted by organizations, public opinion has shifted against e-cigarettes.

His detractors claim that bad science is driving bad policies.

Kenneth Warner, a founding board member of the Truth Initiative and former dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, says, “They’ve convinced the majority of the public, including a majority of smokers, that vaping is as bad as or more dangerous than smoking.” “That’s insane.”

David Abrams, a New York University professor, and seasoned tobacco researcher adds, “Stan has always been an enthusiast and ideologue eager to skew the science.”

He claims that when Glantz focused on combustible tobacco, several experts overlooked problems in his studies because they, too, were anti-smokers.

“To be honest, none of us cared if he was careless with his research since the ends justified the means,” adds Abrams.

Glantz denies that his activism has influenced his study. He says, “That’s complete nonsense.”

“In reality, it’s the opposite way around. The science informs the activism.”

He claims that proponents of harm reduction—the assumption that, in the case of e-cigarettes, vaping can lessen the harm caused by smoking—underestimate the risks of vaping.

While Glantz left USCF last year, he remains the anti-tobacco movement’s go-to scientist and a respected figure on campus.

At a campus event earlier this year, Pam Ling, who succeeded Glantz as head of USCF’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, remarked, “His research accomplishments in tobacco control are legendary.”

His work has had a huge impact on public policy, according to both supporters and detractors.

Glantz was the “preeminent translator of the science of tobacco and disease into the public discourse of tobacco control” for four decades, especially during the early days of the US anti-smoking movement, according to Michael Pertschuk, the former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, in his 2001 book “Smoke in Their Eyes.”

According to Pertschuk’s assessment, the feisty professor became a “master of the sound bite” and a “tactical gem.”

Glantz’s papers have been frequently acknowledged and disseminated, despite methodological concerns.

and his unwavering support for smoke-free environments helped to cut smoking, save lives, and reduce disease tolls.

Clifford Douglas, director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network, said, “He genuinely has been a hero in this global effort to combat the smoking epidemic.”

What effect has his work had on e-cigarettes? That’s a lot more complicated.

The CEOs of America’s seven top tobacco corporations stood before a congressional committee and a flurry of media cameras on April 14, 1994, and testified under oath that cigarettes were not addictive.

A Federal Express package containing 4,000 pages of classified tobacco industry documents arrived at Glantz’s UCSF office less than a month later.

Mr. Butts, a character in the comic strip “Doonesbury” who encouraged kids to smoke, was the return address.

The tobacco CEOs had lied, as evidenced by the four-foot-tall stack of papers.

“Nicotine is addictive,” a vice president at Brown & Williamson admitted in a memo dated 1963, acknowledging the company was in the business of selling an addictive medication.

Other details were revealed in the files, including a letter from movie star Sylvester Stallone promising to use Brown & Williamson cigarettes in five films in exchange for $500,000.

Glantz shared the files with regulators, litigators, and reporters, published research to expose industry methods, and arranged for the documents to be digitized, all while working with colleagues at UCSF.

has raised millions of dollars over time to construct a massive and important library of information produced by the food, pharmacy, and chemical sectors, as well as cigarette businesses.

The tobacco archive alone now houses almost 14 million items.

“The documents completely changed the tobacco debate,” Glantz says.

Big Tobacco and its supporters retaliated with a vengeance. Brown & Williamson filed a lawsuit against UCSF, alleging that the records were stolen.

An industry-funded group called Californians for Scientific Integrity filed a lawsuit against the academic system.

Glantz was accused of scientific misconduct in a study on the impact of smoking prohibitions on the restaurant business.

Tobacco industry friends in Congress tried unsuccessfully to have a National Cancer Institute funding to Glantz revoked.

Several anti-smoking groups petitioned the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to suspend his consultancy contract.

The National Smokers Alliance called Glantz an “avowed anti-smoking campaigner” in a letter to OSHA requesting that the agency cut connections with him. That was one accusation Glantz couldn’t refute.

Glantz was an anti-smoking campaigner long before he became a tobacco researcher, and he has often performed both roles at the same time throughout his career.

In 1978, he volunteered to help with a statewide drive in California to limit smoking in public places, but the tobacco lobby defeated it.

He explains, “I got drawn into the campaign leadership.”

Californians for Nonsmokers’ Rights, a charity that was incorporated in 1981 and expanded into Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights five years later, was founded by him.

He was a key figure in the 1983 campaign that made San Francisco one of the first large cities in the United States to prohibit smoking in public places, a national and worldwide milestone.

Glantz has an unusual pedigree for a tobacco scientist, notwithstanding his activism. Physicians, epidemiologists, economists, attorneys, and psychologists make up the majority of the group.

Glantz earned a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Cincinnati, where he also worked for a short time at NASA, as well as a master’s and Ph.D. in applied mechanics from Stanford University.

His Ph.D. thesis, “A mathematical approach to heart muscle physiology,” was a study of cardiovascular function.

In the early 1980s, his knowledge of cardiac mechanics led him to tobacco study.

In every way, he found tobacco work more satisfying. Grants from the National Institutes of Health were available to explore the effects of smoking, and tobacco research funding was expected to increase.

In 2009, Congress mandated that tobacco businesses begin paying annual user fees to fund FDA regulation and National Institutes of Health-supervised university research.

(In 2020, the corporations paid more than $700 million.) Glantz’s work was also backed by private funders such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Truth Initiative.

UCSF has received well over $75 million as a result of this initiative.

More importantly, Glantz’s lifetime dedication to social change was reflected in his tobacco study.

When he was a graduate student at Stanford, he published his first paper in Science, which looked at the impact of US Department of Defense contracts on research at the university.

He proudly wore a T-shirt that read, “Here Comes Trouble,” and embraced his status as a rabble-rouser.

He thinks that working toward a smoke-free society has been particularly rewarding.

It’s easy to forget that people used to smoke in public places like work, restaurants, airports, and even hospital waiting rooms.

“The executive director of the California division of the American Lung Association was a chain-smoker, and the American Heart Association handed ashtrays and packs of cigarettes at its board meetings,” Glantz wrote in his book Tobacco War.

Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights took the fight to towns and cities across the country with Glantz’s full support.

Unlike in Washington, there, grassroots campaigners might be able to overcome the cigarette industry. More than 400 municipalities have passed anti-smoking ordinances.

The issue of secondhand smoking changed tobacco politics forever. The tobacco industry could no longer defend smoking as a personal choice.

Smoking was recast as a source of indoor air pollution and a danger to others’ health.

“The issue should be presented in the rhetoric of the environment, harmful chemicals, and public health, rather than the rhetoric of saving smokers from themselves or the cigarette companies,” Glantz said in a 1987 editorial in the journal Circulation.

“Unquestionably, Stan was one of the primary combatants in the fight against secondhand smoke,” says James Repace, a former EPA official and one of the first experts to study the effects of secondhand smoke on health.

Cigarette manufacturers were well aware of the threat from the start. A public opinion research group warned the Tobacco Institute, the industry’s lobbying arm, in a 1978 report: “This we consider as the most damaging development to the profitability of the tobacco industry that has yet occurred.”

But how hazardous was secondhand smoke? While specialists agree that the risks of prolonged exposure are significant, particularly for youngsters, many proponents contend that they are exaggerated.

Despite unanswered questions, cigarette opponents boiled the evidence down to three words: secondhand smoke kills.

“There is no risk-free amount of exposure to secondhand smoke,” the Surgeon General declared in 1986.

The man in a 1997 anti-smoking bus billboard featuring a nicely dressed couple inquired, “Mind if I smoke?” “Do you mind if I die?” the woman asked.

After a long battle, New York City’s then-mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a measure that effectively banned smoking in restaurants and bars in December 2002.

Glantz reported the startling results of his latest study at an American College of Cardiology meeting a few months later: the rate of heart attacks in Helena, Montana, had dropped by over 60% after a six-month smoking ban in the small town.

“This startling discovery suggests that shielding individuals from the carcinogens in secondhand smoking not only makes life more pleasant; it also starts saving lives right away,” he remarked at the time.

When the restriction was lifted due to a court challenge, Glantz and two local physicians who worked on the study stated that heart attacks returned to historic levels.

The Helena miracle, as the study was dubbed, received worldwide attention, including a New York Times op-ed.

It was favorably praised by anti-smoking organizations. However, it defied logic.

Smoking was outlawed in California workplaces and bars, yet there was no obvious reduction in heart attacks.

No one had detected a decrease in heart attacks in other major cities that had implemented smoking bans.

The tiny sample size in Helena—four cases per month during the ban versus seven before the ban—should have raised warning flags; random fluctuations could have explained the decline in hospital admissions.

The reduction in heart attacks was revised downward to 40% when the study, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute, was published in the BMJ, but it was still a remarkable result. Opponents retaliated.

In a response to the journal, Henry Mizgala, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, wrote, “I am truly amazed that a study of such poor quality was not only accepted for publication in a journal with the reputation of the BMJ but was accorded widespread coverage in the lay press.”

“This is, in my judgment, blatant misrepresentation aimed to maximize public impact in support of these authors’ biassed and unscientific viewpoints.”

(In a declaration, Mizgala stated that he “provided affidavits on behalf of defendants in the cigarette action.”) Michael Siegel of Boston University, a former student of Glantz’s, was one of the few anti-smoking activists who questioned the findings.

“I am apprehensive that the credibility of tobacco control scientists and practitioners may be endangered if scientific statements are made that are not adequately justified,” he wrote in his response to the BMJ.

The Helena miracle received widespread media attention and was lauded by anti-smoking organizations. However, it defied logic.

Glantz’s findings were later refuted by a greater sample size study.

Both England and New Zealand, which enacted universal smoking bans in public places, saw significantly lesser effects, with England seeing a 2% reduction in heart attacks and New Zealand seeing no meaningful effects.

According to a study conducted by academics at the Rand Corporation and elsewhere, the reductions in Helena,

The short sample sizes, which seemed to be validated by research in other small locations such as Pueblo and Greeley, Colorado, were most likely a result of their small sample sizes.

“We find no indication that enacted smoking restrictions in the United States were related with short-term decreases in hospital admissions for acute myocardial infarction or other disorders in the elderly, children, or working-age adults,” the authors found.

Glantz is adamant about his findings. (His current biography mentions them.) He points out that the study indicated that the effect was true at the 95 percent confidence interval, but that it ranged from 1% to 79 percent, implying that the reduction in heart attacks may have been much larger or smaller.

Those who used the data to support smoking bans, on the other hand, never highlighted the disclaimer.

Both the Institute of Medicine and the Surgeon General have decided that there is a causal link between smoking prohibitions and a reduction in coronary events, such as heart attacks, albeit the amount of the effect is unknown.

The Helena study’s published version acknowledged its limitations, pointing to the city’s modest size.

“There is always the possibility that the difference we observed was attributable to some unobserved confounding variable or systemic bias,” the scientists wrote.

They ended by claiming that smoking prohibitions “might be related with an influence on morbidity from heart disease.”

Glantz, on the other hand, showed no such restraint while explaining the study. Glantz was reported in the original UCSF press release announcing the findings as saying, “Smoke-free regulations save lives, and they do so quickly.”
This signaled the start of a pattern.

Former director of the London-based anti-tobacco organization Action on Smoking and Health, Clive Bates, believes that Glantz frequently makes claims in the media or on his blog that are much beyond what his research shows.

“When he was doing things that we thought were good,” Bates added, “we didn’t worry too much about it.”

With the introduction of the e-cigarette, all of that changed.

Glantz makes a brief appearance in the history of vaping.

Two Stanford graduate students dived deep into UCSF’s tobacco business archives to build the gadget that became JUUL, the dominant e-cigarette brand in the United States, reviewing past attempts by tobacco corporations R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris to design electronic cigarettes.

Glantz was approached by the students, who wanted his help for a cigarette cessation tool they were pitching. He declined, stating that vaping is appealing to children.

He was correct in that regard. By 2018, one in every five high school kids had smoked e-cigarettes, thanks to JUUL’s aggressive marketing on Instagram, in magazines, and on billboards.

At the time, the US Surgeon General lamented what he called an “epidemic of youth e-cigarette usage.”

On the other hand, there were fewer young people smoking cigarettes than ever before. According to several experts, vaping is a disruptive technology that is assisting in the long-term reduction of smoking.

The ensuing dispute polarised the tobacco research community. Nicotine and Tobacco Research published a remark in which

“The continuous promotion of chosen, polarising viewpoints on e-cigarettes would endanger the integrity of research,” said a group of nine early-career researchers led by Dana Mowls Carroll of the University of Minnesota.

Steven Schroeder, the former president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a professor of medicine at UCSF, spoke at a 2020 symposium on e-cigarettes and public health.

Researchers on both sides have been accused of engaging in “troublesome activities” and “strident speech.”

He reserved his harshest remarks for e-cigarette opponents.

“Some have gone beyond the science in their anti-vaping crusade, stretching the results, cherry-picking the analyses, and skirting conventional scientific practices,” Schroeder added.

Glantz took a stand early on and has been true to it. Before the so-called vaping epidemic began in 2013, a background report was written for the World Health Organization.

To reduce e-cigarette usage, Glantz and two UCSF colleagues advocated for a variety of legislation, including flavor prohibitions.

Glantz has been at the center of the controversy ever since, co-authoring a slew of scholarly publications on e-cigarettes, many of which have been frequently cited.

His research has addressed the most pressing concerns about e-cigarettes. He offers three main assertions, all of which are hotly debated.

E-cigarettes, according to the first claim, promote young people to smoke cigarettes.

According to a UCSF press release, Glantz’s 2014 research in JAMA Pediatrics was the first national study to indicate that e-cigarettes were a “gateway to nicotine addiction for US youth.”

In a 2018 study published in Pediatrics, he suggested that using e-cigarettes increases young people to smoke.

Glantz said, “I don’t know anyone credible who doesn’t embrace the gateway.”

Neither study, however, established the existence of a gateway effect. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2014 discovered links between vaping and smoking.

However, there’s no way to tell from the data whether young individuals vaped first and then smoked, or vaped first and then smoked, or had a preference for both.

The 2018 Pediatrics research claimed a gateway impact, but when other juvenile behaviors, including marijuana use, were taken into consideration, the supposed link between vaping and smoking vanished.

The findings stated in JAMA Pediatrics were openly refuted by experts at the American Cancer Society and the Truth Initiative, anti-smoking organizations that were open to the possibility that e-cigarettes could minimize the harm caused by smoking for a brief period in the mid-2000s.

(Both are now staunch opponents of e-cigarettes.) “Many of the broad implications that this study draws are not supported by the data,” Thomas Glynn, a researcher at the American Cancer Society at the time, told The New York Times.

Glynn, Abrams, and Raymond Niaura, a colleague of Abrams’ at NYU and another lifelong tobacco researcher, submitted a critique of the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the parent magazine of JAMA Pediatrics.

In an open letter, Bates, a British anti-smoking activist and vocal critic of Glantz, branded the study’s conclusions “false, misleading, and destructive.”

The report published in Pediatrics in 2018 was also heavily criticized. According to Niaura, population studies provide the most compelling reason to dismiss suggestions of a gateway hypothesis.

who, like Abrams, was previously an unpaid member of Philip Morris International’s Foundation for a Smoke-Free World’s Scientific Technical Advisory Council.

He continues, “Cigarette smoking among kids is going down, down, down.”

“Smoking would increase if e-cigarette use drove cigarette consumption up.” (E-cigarettes, according to Glantz, have slowed the fall.)

The second disputable Glantz assertion is that when sold as consumer goods, e-cigarettes do not assist smokers in quitting.

Glantz made this case in two meta-analyses, one in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine in 2016 and the other in the American Journal of Public Health in 2020.

“The irony is that one of the main reasons both adults and children use e-cigarettes is to quit smoking.

“However, the overall effect is less quitting, not more,” Glantz stated in a press release reporting the findings in 2016.

Meta-analyses can be tricky, especially when they include diverse types of data.

They are wholly dependent on the quality of the underlying studies, and opponents claim that the Lancet research fell short in this aspect.

The Truth Initiative (then known as the American Legacy Foundation) experts argued in a report to the FDA that the Lancet paper featured research that was “uninformative and plagued by inadequate measurement.”

“Quantitatively synthesizing disparate studies is scientifically improper, and as a result, the outcomes of such meta-analyses are invalid,” they continued.

Scientists in the United Kingdom, where vaping is promoted as a healthier alternative to smoking, slammed the report as “grossly deceptive,” “not scientific,” and a “serious failure of the peer review system.”

Ann McNeil, a professor of tobacco addiction at King’s College London, responded to the Lancet paper, claiming that it contained “either inaccurate or misleading” information about two studies she co-authored and that Glantz and his co-author, Sara Kalkhoran, then a physician at UCSF, were told before publication “that they were misreporting the findings.”

(Glantz claims he doesn’t remember the specifics, but he and Kalkhoran wouldn’t have ignored such a warning.)

Since then, a slew of contradictory data has emerged. Kalkhoran departed UCSF in 2015 to pursue a two-year research project at Harvard University, where she and colleagues investigated adult cigarette smokers in the United States.

Kalkhoran and her co-authors found that “daily e-cigarette usage, compared to no e-cigarette use, was related with a 77 percent greater likelihood of protracted cigarette smoking abstinence,” based on data from 8,000 adult smokers.

(Requests for comment from Kalkhoran were not returned.) “We are relatively sure that nicotine e-cigarettes help more people to stop smoking than nicotine replacement therapy or nicotine-free e-cigarettes,” stated Cochrane, an independent network of academics, after reviewing randomized control trials using e-cigarettes for smoking cessation.

According to Action on Smoking and Health, 3.6 million people in the UK use e-cigarettes, with nearly two-thirds of them being ex-smokers.

None of this will put an end to the argument over whether electronic cigarettes can assist smokers in quitting.

However, in a meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2020, Glantz and his co-authors conceded some ground.

“Daily e-cigarette usage was related with more quitting,” they noted, though only under certain conditions.

Glantz, on the other hand, continues to oppose vaping, claiming that the health hazards are too significant.

The third and final Glantz allegation, that e-cigarettes raise the risk of heart attack, has gotten the most opposition.

Glantz and colleagues completed two investigations in less than a year that prompted him to promote this viewpoint.

“Risk of heart attacks is twice for daily e-cigarette users,” he said on his UCSF blog in August 2018, referring to the findings of the first study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Glantz said the second study, which was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in 2019, revealed “more evidence that e-cigarettes cause heart attacks” ten months later.

“E-cigarettes should not be promoted or recommended as a less harmful alternative to combustible cigarettes,” he stated emphatically.

This work had a huge impact on anti-vaping activists and government health officials.

The publication in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine was cited by the WHO chief and the US Surgeon General, and approximately 200 news items were written about it.

According to a New York Times report, “daily e-cigarette users almost doubled their risk of heart attack compared to persons who never used e-cigarettes.”

Critics pounced on what they called the analysis’ “glaring faults.” Some of the e-cigarette users, for example, had previously smoked, clouding the picture.

Brad Rodu, a University of Louisville professor with a long history of ties to the tobacco industry, dug into the raw data.

and discovered that at least 11 of the 38 heart-attack victims referenced in the Journal of the American Heart Association study had their heart attacks before they started vaping—some as long as ten years ago.

The journal’s editor afterward found that Glantz was made aware of the timing issue before publishing because it was noted by a peer reviewer.

Sixteen tobacco researchers requested a retraction in a letter to the journal’s editor.

The Journal of the American Heart Association eventually did precisely that, which it had only done a few times before in its history.

In a letter to Glantz, the journal’s editor, on the other hand, was cautious to stress that “the retraction notice is purposely free of any language alleging scientific wrongdoing.”

The report published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2019 was also under fire.

Twenty-two tobacco scientists requested a retraction, citing, among other things, the following:

that the link between vaping and heart attacks could be explained by heavy smokers who are at risk of heart disease switching to e-cigarettes,

or smokers who have had heart problems and are using e-cigarettes to stop.

They wrote that asserting or implying causation from the study is irresponsible.
“It’s lousy science,” Niaura says.

The paper was not retracted by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Matthew Boulton.

However, he admitted in a letter to the 22 scientists earlier this year that the work had “severe methodological difficulties,” including the fact that the researchers’ database “makes it impossible to make causal conclusions.”

New academics have been commissioned by the journal to study the problem in a piece that will be presented to readers as a cautionary tale about how data might be misconstrued.

Glantz has made no apologies. He blamed the withdrawal of the Journal of the American Heart Association on “pressure from e-cig interests,” mentioning Rodu, on his blog.

None of the other scientists who signed the letters requesting retractions appear to be connected to the industry financially.

NYU’s Abrams once wrote an op-ed for Filter, a newspaper sponsored by The Influence Foundation, which has received tobacco industry funding. (Abrams claims he was not compensated.)

Glantz’s response to the correction, according to Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia University who followed the dispute on his blog, was “anti-scientific.”

“If someone points out an error in your work, you should repair the error and appreciate the person who pointed it out,” he wrote.

Rather than attacking and attempting to save your position by procedural arguments.”

Glantz departed from UCSF last summer after 45 years of service.

He responded to colleagues, “I’m optimistic that there will be additional avenues for me to contribute to battling the tobacco business and advancing public health.”

Aside from the controversy around his study, his final years at UCSF were challenging.

Three women accused him of sexual harassment and sued him, as well as the University of California Regents, who battled the allegations in court. The lawsuits were subsequently settled without any acknowledgement of guilt.

Meanwhile, there were troubling indicators that the anti-e-cigarette effort led by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the Truth Initiative, was backfiring.

which had changed its mind on e-cigarettes by this point—was having unforeseen consequences.

According to a study by academics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Minnesota placed a high price on e-cigarettes, which resulted in “increased adult smoking and lower smoking cessation.”

The Wall Street Journal said in a story titled “Smoking’s Long Decline is Over” that some e-cigarette users may have switched back to traditional cigarettes “due to rising e-cigarette taxes, limits on flavored vaping goods, and misunderstanding about the health impacts of vaping.”

According to public opinion polls, the majority of people incorrectly assume that vaping is just as deadly as smoking.

Glantz says he had been intending to leave UCSF for years before he announced his retirement.

He says he’ll keep doing academic study and advocacy, as well as speaking out on his blog and elsewhere.

He’s pleased of having mentored hundreds of scholars over the years, saying, “It’s vital to give others opportunity.”

One of the people mentored by Glantz, Siegel, has ambivalent sentiments about him. Siegel declares, “I love him.”

“He has a lot of accomplishments.” However, Siegel claims that he no longer has faith in Glantz and the anti-tobacco organizations.

“The anti-smoking agenda is not driven by science,” he claims. “Rather, it appears that the anti-smoking goal is driving the scientific interpretation.”

Glantz, for one, believes that the growing public view of e-cigarettes as harmful is a good thing—and one that is supported by science.

“None of the individuals who are into e-cigarettes know anything about biology,” Glantz says.