Commentary on Staff et al.: Should smoke‐free areas be made vape‐free?
Abstract
Vaping is less harmful to bystanders' health than smoking, but it may still affect their behaviour in negative ways. It may encourage people to start vaping, increase dependence or make quitting vapes difficult. When considering vape-free rules, these effects must be weighed against possible downsides, such as less encouragement for smokers to switch and greater restriction of vapers' freedom. Governments, businesses, schools and parents must decide whether to expand smoke-free rules banning smoking inside to include vaping. Staff et al. [1] show that youths in homes that ban vaping are less likely to start vaping than those living without such restrictions. If causal—as the alignment of results from matching and hybrid panel models supports—this indicates that youth vaping could be reduced by more families introducing vape-free rules. The justification for families imposing such rules is clear; they have a duty to protect their children from harm and are free to choose what behaviour (within reason) they discourage inside their home. Schools share a similar responsibility. More justification is needed for restricting the freedom of adults by, for instance, banning vaping inside work-places and bars. When smoking was banned inside public places in England, there were two lines of argument [2] * used to support it: (1) substantial direct health harm to bystanders and (2) substantial indirect public health harm through negative behavioral effects from normalizing smoking [3].…
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