These are good times for anti-smoking campaigners. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to their rhetoric. At the urging of anti-tobacco activists, the Department of Transportation is proposing to ban electronic cigarette use aboard aircraft.
This impending regulation not only defies medical evidence but makes a mockery of the law in the process.
The use of e-cigarettes among U.S. adults more than doubled between 2010 and 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The tobacco industry predicts e-cigarette sales will surpass traditional cigarettes in the coming decades. This signals great progress from a harm-reduction standpoint, since the best available scientific evidence suggests that while e-cigarettes may bring health risks, they are far smaller than those associated with tobacco smoking.
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