Many users of e-cigarettes enthuse about them because they wanted to give up smoking and found that e-cigarettes allowed them to do this. For this reason they are fully endorsed by former chief of Action on Smoking and Health Clive Bates, who supports e-cigarettes as a sane method of 'tobacco harm reduction' and criticises those who support only pharmaceutical methods of stopping smoking.
Smokers are suspicious of this benign approach to tobacco harm reduction, feeling that if generally accepted it will lead to more erosion of choice, as efforts are put into denormalising tobacco use in favour of e-cigarettes.
I see it as a prohibition issue. There is no need to make rules against the use of e-cigarettes, certainly not to ban them (where tobacco itself is not banned). According to an extraordinary BBC report,
Why don't we just ban the sale of matches, lighters, gas refill canisters, candles, gas fires, ad infinitum? There is nothing dangerous about sensibly used e-cigarettes in a realistic environment (i.e. one where people don't have to use them covertly).A spokesperson for NHS Fife, which has banned staff from using them at work, said: "Potential fire and safety risks have been identified."The heating element provides a source of ignition similar to a traditional cigarette which could ignite bedding or clothing."
This one is the best though ...
Dr Vivienne Nathanson said that e-cigarettes look bad because they 'look like smoking'. She should consider that the reason e-cigarettes have so quickly 'renormalised' smoking is that denormalisation hasn't worked as a strategy. Banning the use of e-cigarettes in the workplace because of their similarity with smoking has to be the most self-defeating ban imaginable.Dr Nathanson said: "They are designed to look like smoking so what they do is they renormalise the concept of smoking, just at a time when we've all got used to the fact that smoking in the workplace is not normal nor allowed."
