The same can be said for pipe tobacco.

I went to an 80 year old's birthday party recently and he has been smoking since WW2 or thereabouts. His advice - get a pipe and buy tobacco from a proper tobacconist. In that way he avoids all the chemical horrors of regular hand rolling tobacco. Normally this stuff has flavours in it, stuff to make it burn and stuff to keep it moist. The difference is huge.

My advice to the government is to ban adulterated tobacco products so only dry rolling tobacco is for sale. Then to apply a minimum age to buy tobacco with this age rising one year every other year. In a relatively short period of time tobacco will become as rare as pipe smoking is.

Most of the harmful chemicals aren't additives, they're combustion products that would be there no matter how the tobacco is cured and processed.

Alternate anecdote: my grandfather smoked pipe tobacco for as long and died of heart failure complications due to lifelong nicotine usage, after already dealing with lung cancer-related illness.

Pipe tobacco isn't that much "safer", either.

Are there statistics or studies on how much one average person consumes from an e-cigarette compared to a regular cigarette?

100% anecdotal but the few people I know that use e-cigs are using them all day long. I'm just glad a lot of places treat it the same as smoking and ban it. Nothing worse than being in line with someone that thinks its cool to vape and blow huge clouds.

I smoke slightly more with ecigs than I did with cigarettes and I use the vape throughout the day. But whenever I have a real cigarette now I get a head rush and feel the nicotine quite strong, which is the feeling I would previously get with the first cigarette after the numerous times I quit smoking and started again. Clearly I'm using far less nicotine with e-cigarettes, which surprised me because I didn't notice any side effects (additional "niccing") when I switched to vaping last yr.

So even if I smoke 30% more than I used to I'm probably consuming significantly less harmful chemicals in the end, including nicotine. Which means it will probably be easier to quit vaping than cigarettes, especially as I could taper the nicotine percentage from 6mg -> 0mg over a period of time without adjusting behaviour.

At 6mg -> 0mg I wouldn't say nicotine is a harmful chemical. It's a stimulant.

I don't think the debate is that nicotine is harmful in such quantities, but it's a terribly addictive stimulant generally consumed with varyingly harmful chemicals, so easing it out to zero helps in quitting inhaling those chemicals altogether.

Apart from the obvious bad manners implied by blowing huge clouds of smoke in a space where people are tightly packed, as in a queue; what problem do you have with e-smoke exactly? The smell?

This is literally stuff that's been inside a person's body being ejected out into my face. Now, I kinda agree that everyone is doing this constantly by simply breathing, but I don't really smell other people's exhaled CO2 so I'm ok with it. If it has odor and is visible, I WILL find it VERY rude and disturbing, to say the least.

The smell is often quite overpowering. I think "cloying" is the word; sometimes I feel like my airways are trying to close up.

I also don't know what's in the smoke. It might be harmless, might be absolutely awful for you. Doesn't help that my friends have used the excuse "it's just vapor".

excuse?

With a smell allergy, I've had e-cigs (and perfumes, which I lump in the same category) near me induce everything from coughing and sneezing fits to migraines and vomiting.

I knew a friend with a much, much worse smell allergy where a smell of the right color dye would cause seizures and possibly kill them.

Whoa, I'm not alone! I can't handle most perfumes or scents (in addition to a number of things). Nowhere near as bad as your friend, but I can get to the point where breathing gets hard.

I also find people's breath smelly on public transport. The reason is not just cigarettes but bad oral hygiene in general. Not sure what to do about it though...

On the other hand I hardly ever felt any vapour smell from e-cigarettes.

Also... Smoke is a mixture of gas and solid materials, while vapour is a mixture of gas and liquid.

I think using precise terms in a debate brings extra clarity into it, so instead of inventing poetic proxy terms, like e-smoke, let's just use the more commonly understood word "vapour" instead.

I smoked cigarettes in the past and used ecigs to make cessation easier. When I switched, I used the vape more than cigarettes, but I also had a lot easier of a time quitting the vape(due to the lack of MAOI I believe). Even if people vape more than smoke, it may be worth it if they​ use it to successfully quit smoking altogether.

What, ordinary cigarettes have monoaminoxidase inhibitors?!

Yes, as a component of tobacco, and it's basically the reason that tobacco is addictive

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593

Anecdotally: my mother frequently smokes regular cigarettes, she'll light one for a few 'puffs' then put it out.

To combat this, tobacco companies put some sugar on the filter tip and I believe better tobacco in the very tip of the cigarette, this way the first hit is better than all of the others.

If you smoke anything in parts, it's well worth it to learn to purge. It's a cigar trick, you basically slowly blow through the cigar for a few seconds and it improves the taste and slows the burn for a while.

It might just be the placebo effect that makes it taste better after, but who cares?

In my personal experience more.

I read a study showing that the absorption rate of nicotine is about half through an e-cigarette, because of other chemicals in normal cigarettes that increase the rate.