How the BMJ (Emily Banks et al) Turned a Human Rights Argument Into an Anti-Vaping Manifesto

Alan Gor 16 November 2025

The BMJ’s latest piece, “How e-cigarettes compromise children’s human rights”, reads less like a scientific review and more like a political pamphlet for the WHO’s anti-nicotine lobby. It claims to champion the rights of children, but what it actually does is weaponise human rights language to justify policies that keep adults smoking and leave teenagers exposed to black-market nicotine products.

The article is exactly what you get when a few academics type “youth vaping harms” into Google Scholar, collect the scariest-sounding abstracts, and stitch them together with WHO talking points. It’s not research, it’s narrative manufacturing.

Below is what the BMJ authors didn’t tell you.

Tom Gatehouse, senior writer

Emily Banks, professor of epidemiology and public health

Brigit Toebes, professor of health law in a global context

Raouf Alebshehy, managing editor

1. They start with anecdotes, not science

The entire argument opens with:

• a vape detector beeping 112 times

• a teacher survey

• “kids don’t want to use toilets anymore”

This isn’t evidence. It’s panic fuel.

If this is the quality of their foundation, no wonder the whole argument collapses under scrutiny.

Meanwhile:

• No quantified harms

• No context on youth smoking reaching record lows

• No explanation of why youth nicotine use varies wildly across countries with identical products

Why? Because the real driver isn’t nicotine, it’s prohibition and black-market availability. But acknowledging that would undermine their conclusion.

2. They quietly admit youth vaping in the US is declining then pretend it’s irrelevant

After citing the U.S. “epidemic” (a 2018 PR slogan created by Scott Gottlieb), they admit:

“youth vaping in the US may have fallen since 2019”

“May have”?

It has - by more than 60%.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative, so they brush past it.

3. Global prevalence numbers are misused to make a moral point, not a scientific one

They claim:

7.2% of children aged 13–15 use e-cigarettes

“nine times the rate of adults”

But they do not mention:

• Most adult surveys cap at age 24–34

• Many countries have already banned safer nicotine entirely

• Youth access is driven overwhelmingly by the black market

If prohibition were “protecting children,” these numbers would not exist.

4. They repeatedly treat nicotine like plutonium

They cite the usual list of speculative harms from adolescent nicotine exposure, attention, cognition, and mood as if they are proven.

But the evidence they rely on:

• comes mostly from rodent studies

• does not separate nicotine from trauma, poverty, or pre-existing mental health disorders

• cannot establish causality

The mental health crisis began years before the youth vaping bump. But blaming nicotine is easier than addressing chronic underfunding of youth mental health services, especially when those same public health agencies rely on fear-based narratives for funding.

5. The “gateway” claim is based on the most outdated, discredited evidence in tobacco research

They cite a 2025 “umbrella review.”

Here’s the problem:

• Gateway studies do not establish causation

• They rely on self-selection bias

• They ignore shared risk predisposition

• They collapse when you include confounders like impulsivity or socio-economic status

The authors themselves begrudgingly admit causality cannot be inferred, but they bury that line deep in the text and continue as if the causal link is proven.

6. They redefine “harm reduction” to exclude… harm reduction.

This is the most intellectually dishonest part.

The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) explicitly defines tobacco control as including harm reduction.

That’s Article 1(d).

The BMJ authors claim that:

“harm reduction has been hijacked by industry”

Translation:

“Harm reduction is allowed only when we say so.”

They dismiss:

• all independent evidence showing vaping dramatically reduces smoking risk

• all real-world data showing population-level declines in smoking

• all studies showing vaping is the most effective adult cessation tool ever discovered

Why?

Because acknowledging harm reduction would undermine the WHO’s anti-nicotine ideology.

Their argument boils down to:

“If adults benefit from vaping, children’s rights are violated.”

This is a bizarre ethical framework that no other health issue applies.

We don’t ban opioids, insulin pens, heavy machinery, or alcohol rehabilitation medicine because “children might access them.”

7. “Dual use” is dragged out yet again straight from Stanton Glantz’s discarded playbook

They claim:

“a substantial proportion… continue to smoke becoming dual users”

Dual use is overwhelmingly a transition state. All major cohort studies show:

• dual users are more likely to quit over time

• dual use declines with product access, not restrictions

• prohibitions increase dual use by limiting product choice

But the BMJ authors pretend dual use is a permanent outcome because they need a harm narrative.

8. They compare vaping to “breathing air” to make it sound deadly

They write:

“For non-smokers… the correct comparison baseline is breathing air.”

This is rhetorical fraud.

The correct comparator for any risk evaluation is the available alternative.

For adults who smoke, the alternative is cigarettes, not oxygen.

Their argument intentionally misleads by:

• treating adult smokers as irrelevant

• redefining harm to exclude real-world human behaviour

• ignoring 8 million annual smoking deaths

• pretending the ethical obligation is to avoid any risk, even if the alternative is death

It’s an anti-harm-reduction ideology as moral philosophy.

9. They weaponise the Convention on the Rights of the Child to justify the prohibition

The argument is painfully circular:

1. The CRC says protect children from harm.

2. WHO says nicotine is harmful.

3. Therefore, you must restrict vaping.

No evidence.

No nuance.

No recognition that protecting children does not justify harming adults.

Meanwhile, the same authors have nothing to say about:

• youth access in prohibition countries

• the global explosion of deadly black markets

• adult smoking plateaus where vaping is restricted

• the actual rights of adults to reduce their risk of disease

This isn’t human rights.

It’s paternalism pretending to be ethics.

10. The conclusion reveals the true agenda

They insist:

• flavour bans

• retail caps

• plain packaging

• display bans

• removal of adult choice

In other words:

make vaping as inaccessible and unattractive as possible — the same strategy that keeps cigarette sales high and adult quit-rates low.

This is not about children.

It’s about preserving a political ideology and the funding ecosystem built around it.

And let’s be honest:

When the authors’ time is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ anti-vaping initiative, we’re expected to swallow the idea that this does not influence the framing, tone, or conclusions of the paper?

Please.

Bloomberg is the single largest prohibition funder on the planet. His grants support organisations, campaigns, researchers, and advocacy networks whose entire mission is to eliminate nicotine alternatives, not to evaluate them fairly.

So when a study produced under this ecosystem claims that “funders had no role in the study design,” it’s technically correct in the narrow, procedural sense but completely meaningless in the real world. Funding shapes the research agenda long before a paper is drafted. It determines which questions get asked, which don’t, which hypotheses are permissible, and which findings would be professionally “inconvenient.”

Declaring the conflict but pretending it has no practical effect is not transparency, it’s theatre.

This is exactly why public trust in tobacco and vaping research is eroding. The conflicts are disclosed in fine print, then ignored as if their influence magically disappears once acknowledged. Meanwhile, the outputs reliably align with the worldview of the funder.

When the money comes from Bloomberg’s anti-vaping apparatus, bias isn’t a possibility; it’s baked into the system.

The Real Story: This Article Protects the System, Not Children

If the authors were serious about human rights, they’d address:

• The right of adults to access safer alternatives

• The right of children to accurate information

• The right to protection from black-market products created by bad policy

• The right not to be harmed by government failure

But instead, we get:

• recycled fear

• misinterpreted evidence

• moral panic

• WHO talking points

• a complete erasure of adult smokers

• and a call for policies that have already failed everywhere they’ve been tried

This isn’t child protection.

It’s ideological theatre, and the cost will be measured in lives.