Surgeon General vs. Science?

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy tossed a bone to the puritanical ideologues of the anti-smoking movement this week with a warning that the rise in vaping by young people is “a major public health concern.”

“Any tobacco use, including e-cigarettes, is a health threat,” Dr. Murthy insisted, “particularly to young people.”

Now, look: Smoking tobacco, especially cigarettes, is really, really bad for you. Even if the habit doesn’t give you cancer, the longterm health effects are serious — for your lungs, your heart and more.

But scientists are only beginning to study the health impact of e-cigs, as Murthy admitted. And the odds they’ll find serious ones are low, since the vapor has virtually none of the secondary chemicals and parti- cles that make actual smoke so harmful.

Yet, for whatever reason, the anti-smoking movement has turned obsessively against any thought of harm reduction: Vaping is merely the latest alternative to cigarettes to be denounced as a “gateway” to the real thing.

This, when — as Jacob Sullum noted in Forbes in September — US teens’ smoking rates “have fallen to record lows even as more and more of them experiment with vaping.”

E-cigs may yet prove a fad, or perhaps they’ll someday eclipse real cigarettes — by replacing them, which would be a huge net gain for public health.

Assuming the absolutist ideologues don’t manage to crush a promising alternative in its infancy.