The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience.
Recognising that there are health issues, without fully understanding them yet due to there having not been enough time to form complete and solid conclusions, doesn’t make it pseudoscience. It means we should be cautious and continue to study, and certainly not widely adopt their use in the mean time assuming everything will be fine. Especially as it directly interacts with such a sensitive part of our inner bodies, and especially as the largest group taking up their use are teenagers.
Flat prohibitions aren’t saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
I disagree, to blanket suggest prohibitions don’t save lives is not based in fact. Even the misguided alcohol prohibition over in the USA saved lives, reducing the number of deaths that would have otherwise been caused by intoxication (dangerous driving being an obvious example, domestic abuse, etc).
And take this example from literally only yesterday, where a child almost died due to electronic cigarettes and the complications therein (often when people discuss the danger of X and Y, they assume a completely healthy person to begin with, and ignore that a large percentage of the population has at least one illness or environmental factor that it can complicate).
Also, yes cigarettes are available, but their use in public is heavily restricted, and they aren’t attractive to young people any more thanks to decades of hard work in education. Electronic cigarettes however are targeted directly at teenagers in a very predatory way, suggested to be safe and clean, and thus we have these new issues.
In the end, I suspect electronic cigarettes are less dangerous than breathing in smoke from tobacco, which is insanely dangerous, but that will not make them safe, either, and the cumulative effects of electronic cigarette use over decades simply isn’t fully known yet.
We’re working on it, and where our health is concerned, especially that of our impressionable youth, an abundance of caution is always the best course of action.