As I mentioned recently, controversy is swirling around e-cigarettes, which apparently must be stopped — for the children:
The American Lung Association, along with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, recently called for e-cigarettes to be removed from the market. The groups say e-cigarettes have yet to be proven safe and that kids may be attracted to the products, some of which come in flavors like chocolate and strawberry. “Nobody knows what the consumers are actually inhaling,” says Erika Sward, director of national advocacy at the American Lung Association.
I don’t think many children are buying $100 e-cigarettes, even if they do offer fruity flavors. Anyway, notice how nobody knows translates to this must be stopped — even though a reasonable first guess is that e-cigarettes are much less harmful than what smokers are already smoking:
But e-cigarette companies say their product is a better alternative to cigarettes because there is no smoke or combustion involved. “Anybody who doesn’t think this product without any smoke attached to it is orders of magnitude less harmful than cigarettes just has no concept of basic science,” says Jack Leadbeater, president and chief executive of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Sottera Inc., which sells the Njoy brand of electronic cigarettes.
David Henderson cites this as another example of the bizarre world of regulation — in which regulators rarely seem to care about what they say they care about:
Now, if the people who favored the smoking bans really cared about second-hand smoke, they would applaud such a development, right? But they haven’t. [...] It’s probably true that e-cigarettes have not been proved safe. But then you would think, given the potentially huge value of such devices, that the skeptics would want some evidence of safety. Instead, they call for e-cigarettes to be banned.It gets more bizarre. The FDA wants to regulate the device, not because it’s like cigarettes, but because it could be used by those who want to quit smoking.
You see, the FDA currently has the power to regulate smoking-cessation products but not tobacco — and we couldn’t let that power go unused, could we?