E-Cigarettes Sow Confusion—Among Anti-Smoking Activists

I’ve got a
new piece at The National Post about irrational
hostility to e-cigarettes within the anti-smoking movement. Here is
how it starts:

“E-cigarettes have taken us back 50 years,” according to the
headline over a commentary that National Jewish Health, a medical
centre in Denver, recently paid to place on the op-ed page
of The New York Times. The essay — co-authored by
David Tinkelman and Amy Lukowski, who are in charge of the
hospital’s “health initiatives,” including its tobacco-cessation
program — never substantiates that claim, which is typical of
e-cigarette critics who see a public-health menace where they
should see a way of reducing tobacco-related disease and death.

You might think people concerned about the health effects of
smoking would welcome an alternative that involves neither tobacco
nor combustion and is therefore much less hazardous. But with some
notable exceptions, anti-smoking activists and public-health
officials have been mostly hostile to electronic cigarettes, which
deliver nicotine in a propylene glycol vapour. This puzzling
resistance seems to be driven by emotion rather than science or
logic.

Read the whole thing.