On Balance: Recent Developments in the Market for Vaping Products and the Implications for Benefit-Cost Analysis
Since electronic cigarettes were introduced, in 2007, they have presented controversial public health tradeoffs. E-cigarettes provide users with the addictive chemical nicotine but without exposing them to the harmful combustion-generated toxicants in cigarette smoke. On the one hand, because smoking combustible cigarettes is estimated to lead to almost 500,000 deaths each year, e-cigarettes have great potential as a harm reduction strategy. In particular, evidence from randomized clinical trials shows that vaping e-cigarettes helps adult smokers quit. On the other hand, the growing popularity of vaping among teens raises concerns about nicotine addiction, the possibility that vaping is a gateway to smoking, and unknown future health consequences. More teens now vape e-cigarettes than smoke cigarettes. In the National Youth Tobacco Survey, the fraction of high school students reporting vaping within the past 30 days increased from 11.7 percent in 2017 to 27.5 percent in 2019, before dropping to 19.6 percent in 2020. Some public policies – increasing the legal purchase to 21 and banning e-cigarette flavors popular with teens – try to target teen vaping. Other policies, most notably e-cigarette excise taxes, discourage both adult and teen vaping.
More than 450,000 Americans died of an opioid overdose between 1999 and 2018. There were fifteen fatal opioid overdoses for every 100,000 individuals in 2018, a ratio five times greater than in 1999. While public health researchers and policymakers have rightly turned their attention toward remedying the global coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. opioid epidemic continues to take lives. In my dissertation, An Empirical Analysis of Policy Responses to the Opioid Epidemic, I analyzed the effect of various state and federal interventions to reduce opioid abuse and overdoses. This analysis can contribute to the benefit-cost analysis of policies that aim to decrease opioid consumption and overdose deaths.
On the 26th of March, the Associated Press reported that, "Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has said that if all of his sweeping, expensive measures to stem the coronavirus saved one life, it would be worth it." This surely must be hyperbole, but he has also said, "We’re not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable… And we’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life." At the same time, it seems that there is an increasing call in public discourse for a sensible weighing of the pros and cons of "lockdown" measures, which I suspect anyone reading this blog would agree is a necessary component of good decision making. If Cuomo's sentiment about the value of life is shared among decision makers and the public, how do we get our benefit-cost message across in an effective way, that can actually improve the quality of public decision making, at this particular moment, in this particular context? 
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a long history of providing comprehensive guidance for conducting economic analyses, including benefit-cost analyses for environmental regulations. Much of that guidance is distilled in the EPA’s 
Currently, e-cigarette supporters and opponents are passionately debating what regulations to impose on the products, if any. These debates have been playing out in legislative chambers across the United States, ranging from city halls to Congress, and in federal agencies including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Proponents who argue for no or little regulation maintain that e-cigarettes save lives by helping people quit smoking. Opponents, meanwhile, argue that e-cigarettes themselves are addicting teenagers to nicotine.
Applying benefit-cost analysis to homeland security regulations and related applications is difficult, in part due to issues in measuring security or risk avoided (Roberts, 2019; Farrow and Shapiro, 2009). The 