This could be said about any new product, and is the basis of FUD. Characterising this merely as "honest even if self-interest" is a mistake. The balance of evidence is clearly that the known health benefits of switching from cigarettes to ecigs greatly outweigh the hypothetical unknown risks.

But that's not the question. The question is: are e-cigarettes safe enough to be unregulated? Moreover, the vast majority of products don't involve inhaling chemicals so I'm not sure what you're point is bringing that up.

E-cigarettes are an alternative to something 100% known to be unsafe. Surely a better response is some sort of labeling that the risks are unknown rather than effectively banning them. This pushes people back to something smoking cigarettes, which is going to be bad for smokers, and bad for people like me who dislike being around smokers.

I smoke ecigs and the ones I buy already have the dangerous warning labels on them advising against using nicotine.

What Dylan said. There are more alternatives to no regulation besides "regulated the same as this deadly product from a massively encumbered industry". Bike helmets should probably be regulated too, but if they weren't yet regulated and a bill came up to place them under the same onerous rules as automobiles, the obvious correct choice would be to say no.

That's not the question at all. The question is whether such heavy regulation causes more harm than benefit. And it probably does.

How do we know that? The proposed regulation involves getting FDA approval. That's the process by which we find out how safe they are.

> How do we know that?

You could say the same thing about most products.

Imagine if every food on the market had to pay a million dollars to get certified.

If the FDA wanted to run a generic study on whether vaping was safe, I would applaud it. Even if it charged ten million dollars across the entire industry to fund that study, that would be fine. But making every manufacturer go through an independent highly-expensive process is a product of regulatory capture, not to keep anyone safe.

I find it quite a stretch to lump vaping in with food. The FDA regulates food and drugs. And yes, drug makers do have to pay a strong price to get certified. It incombs to the the drug maker to run toxicology tests, not the FDA. The latter just enforces the conformity of those tests to its standards.

In general, vaping fluid is a couple basic ingredients plus flavors. The basic ingredients should go through drug-level safety testing if they haven't already gone through it. But each recipe on top of that? Very similar to new food recipes.

Or similar to drug combos, which must be certified as such.

Even if the individual drugs have their own certification, mixing them and packaging them together requires a new certification. Now of course, the new cert will rely heavily on the existing docs, so it's not like everything has to be re-proved again, but the interaction & effects thereof are scrutinized a bit more heavily.

It's not mixing and matching drugs. It's taking one single drug and adding flavors. The inactive ingredients do not need the same scrutiny as active ones.

That is "a" process. Another process is widespread usage and observing the result - there has been widespread use for 5+ years (and even further back on a smaller scale) by people who often smoked 20 to 30 years before switching, and I would challenge you to find any evidence suggesting there is a health risk.

Of course this is assuming that the goal of the FDA is to genuinely protect consumers.

This is true for many, many things in the United States. The big category that comes to mind is cosmetics.

I'm aware of at least one component - styrene - which has been linked to cancer and is commonly present in fragrances.