I brought back a pack of electronic cigarettes about five years ago. I bought them in Japan for about $75; they had been made in China. They looked like cigarettes and when you sucked on the inhale end the other end lighted up red. They had a small insert at the mouthpiece where you could put a pure nicotine dissolved mixture which was heated by an electric filament driven by a battery in the cigarette end. Mine was rechargeable inside the cigarette pack.
Over the years, since then, many variations of the e-cigarette have emerged; most no longer look like a cigarette.
We had a stoner house guest, for a few days, who used an e-cigarette that looked pretty much like a cigarette lighter which he could puff on periodically then put it back in his pocket; it was based on marijuana extract. It had a slight marijuana smell. Most e-cigarettes have little or no smell and produce only a non-nicotine vapor.
At this point, exactly nothing is known about the health consequences of e-cigarettes. 1000 monkeys could be smoking at this very minute and we would not know the biological effects for many years. We can also be certain that the vapor produced by e-cigarettes has trivial medical effects.
Nevertheless every Lefty who wants to remake the world in her own image has decided that e-cigarettes are medically harmful and must be regulated like tobacco tar generating cigarettes. Laws and ordinances everywhere are being passed without a shred of evidence to justify them.
This may appear on the surface to be a typical example of the ideological malice built into Lefty-union thinking.
The consequences may not be as bad as most Lefty-union ideological outcomes.
I wake up occasionally and try to explain the incredible economic boom from 1980 until 2008 as the byproduct of the hippie generation. Hippy innovation was a major driving force. What created the rebelliousness among hippies in the first place was their absolute certainty that marijuana was not harmful and that most other similar drugs were not only not harmful but probably psychologically beneficial. An entire generation of 25 million people decided that their society was incompetent, stupid and malicious.
I think the current generation of teenagers who are smoking e-cigarettes, do so with full knowledge that the laws, opinions and experts stacked against e-cigarettes are nonsense. They are happily smoking e-cigarettes in a way that makes them a rebellious, defiant population. The current teenage smoking population is probably no more than 2.5 million people and may not grow much beyond 5 million. But 5 million rebellious people could create a mini boom in economics in the coming decades, like their hippy predecessors.
In any case the presence of lies and distortions about e-cigarettes appears to me to be capable of generating a rebellious, defiant generation that will produce interesting businesses and cultural contributions.