Smoking kills over eight million people every year, 480,000 of them in the US alone.

Even if the current epidemic turns out to be global, vaping is still several orders of magnitude less lethal.

Edit: lots of downvotes but still nobody actually willing to provide evidence for these ridiculous "several orders of magnitude safer" claims.

10 years is not nearly long enough to measure long term health effects, sorry. Being “safer than cigs” isn’t worth anything at all.

I agree with you that the amount of evidence we have is not conclusive and if you browse the various vaping forums online, you can see that most vapers openly admit that as well, the problem arises when the lack of conclusive evidence is used as an argument in favour of prohibition, that is what drives many vapers to respond.

In other words, if something is “possibly harmful but we’re not sure yet”, is that a sufficient reason for making it illegal? Most vapers think that the answer is no.

Spreading false, misleading information doesn't help legitimize your cause.

> the problem arises when the lack of conclusive evidence is used as an argument in favour of prohibition, that is what drives many vapers to respond

I haven't see anyone here doing that, I certainly haven't.

> In other words, if something is “possibly harmful but we’re not sure yet”, is that a sufficient reason for making it illegal? Most vapers think that the answer is no.

I do not thing there is any doubt that vaping is harmful to some degree (that appears to be the scientific consensus). The unresolved questions are "how harmful?" and "is it a net negative for society?". However, even if the answers are "almost as harmful as cigarettes" and "yes, it increases public health risks overall despite reductions in smoking", I still would not support banning e-cigs (though I would support advertising restrictions).

https://archive.epa.gov/pesticides/reregistration/web/pdf/pr...

Another related Glycol saves sick infants from infection and no long-term sequelae reported: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.37.11...

Vegetable Glycerin: https://monq.com/science/vegetable-glycerin/

The more research you do on pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics the more the 96% less harmful than smoking figure appears likely to be in the correct ballpark for harm-reduction vs smoking. Source: https://pneumonia.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41479-...

There appears to be a lot of dispute about those numbers are unrealisticlly high and concerns about conflicts of interest. The wikipedia article provides lots of references on those disputes:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_electronic_cigarette...

Specifically, the study itself states "A limitation of this study is the lack of hard evidence for the harms of most products on most of the criteria"

You could apply the same assessment to strawberries, no? Can't estimate the harm caused by something for which we don't have evidence of harm.

My point is that there are good reasons to view the number presented in that report as very preliminary and unreliable.

Claiming that vaping is orders of magnitude safer than smoking, without proof, is still highly irresponsible. We simply don't know how safe vaping is.

The history of making safety claims about addictive products is quite fraught with delibratly misleading and false statements. Please take care not to exacerbate this.

Why do you say this so categorically?

"...[R]ats were nose-only exposed to filtered air, nebulized vehicle (saline), or three concentrations of PG/VG mixtures, with and without nicotine...Compared with vehicle exposure, the PG/VG aerosols showed only very limited biological effects with no signs of toxicity."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28882640

Propylene glycol has been used as a carrier for pulmonary inhalers as well as in food and cosmetics for decades.

> Propylene glycol has been used as a carrier for pulmonary inhalers as well as in food and cosmetics for decades.

Propylene glycol was deemed safe for oral consumption, not inhalation. I have not seen any sources of information indicating its use in pulmonary inhalers, do you have some sources you can link?

See, e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12425745

It's also listed as approved as an inactive ingredient by the FDA, including for inhalation:

  PROPYLENE GLYCOL | RESPIRATORY (INHALATION) | LIQUID   | 57556 | 6DC9Q167V3 | 10%w/w
  PROPYLENE GLYCOL | RESPIRATORY (INHALATION) | SOLUTION | 57556 | 6DC9Q167V3 | 25%w/w