Forbes: E-Cigs: A Lifesaver That Health Fascists Want To Kill
January 07, 2015TIME AND AGAIN technology has come along to help solve big problems or blast away sclerotic, anti-progress government rules and restrictions. Think about Uber and local taxi cartels or, decades ago, how the invention of money funds upended Depression-era diktats that forced individuals to receive below-market interest rates on their deposits.
One breakthrough that gets absolutely no respect–in fact, it’s aroused intense hostility from people who should know better–is the invention of e-cigarettes. These battery-powered vaporizers contain nicotine and give users the feeling that they’re smoking. But the beauty of them is that there’s no smoke involved. No smoke is going into anyone’s lungs.
Yet all too many public health officials and nanny-state politicians have been scurrying around trying to restrict or ban e-cigarettes in the same way they have real smokes. Some of these scolds are offended because users look like they’re smoking and, even worse, enjoying it. To them smokers must suffer for their sinning; giving up sin should be painful!
Without a shred of credible evidence, these nanny-naggers also claim that e-cigs are a gateway to smoking. The real world shows the opposite: Since the invention of e-cigarettes a few years ago, teenage smoking in the U.S. has fallen by half! Teenage use of vaporizers has kept teens from getting hooked on a truly lethal habit.
Instead of celebrating this fantastic turn of events, public officials are proclaiming a crisis because of the growing use of e-cigs by teens. Tim Worstall, a Forbes.com contributor, gleefully quotes one such nincompoop from a government report noting the plunge in teenage smoking:
“Despite the positive developments this year [about less teenage smoking], we are concerned about the levels of e-cigarette use among teens that we are seeing,” said Lloyd D. Johnson, Ph.D., principal investigator, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. “It would be a tragedy if this product undid some of the great progress made to date in reducing cigarette smoking by teens.”