We're talking about teenagers using and becoming addicted to nicotine. Nicotine is completely inessential to life. Nicotine addicts (smokers or vapers) don't show any benefit in life outcome from it. All it does is put a drain on their finances just to make them feel better every time they experience cravings, cravings which don't exist in non-addicts.

That may not actually be true:

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/study-finds-nicotine-sa...

Did they weight it against coronary disease endpoints, of which we have numerous studies, some even with pure nicotine?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958544/

All case mortality is worse in nicotine users.

Even if vaping were 100% risk free (which I doubt) I think it's certainly better that we don't get kids addicted to nicotine (or any substance). The misinformation doesn't help things though, if kids are going to vape/smoke I'd much rather see them take up nicotine free varieties, I'm not sure why a non-smoker would take up the nicotine ones at all, maybe because companies like juul don't sell them. As someone silly enough to take up smoking as a teenager I think a non-nicotine variety would have had a huge change on my life.

I've seen some strange reactions from family about my vaping (which I've used to cut down smoking significantly). The hypocrisy award goes to my sister claiming it was dangerous and targeted at kids (due to the flavors), she said this while downing an alcopop drink and running one of those essential oil vapour machines in the house.

Nothing is risk free.

If you have a large population then any small risk means harm will be caused to a small number of people.

If people who start vaping are ex smokers we can balance that tiny risk against the huge benefits of smoking cessation.

We can't do that same balancing for young non smokers who start vaping, so from a public health point of view we'd want to avoid it.