Imagine if there were an alternative to smoking cigarettes.

Imagine this alternative could help millions of people quit smoking and came with only a fraction

of the harmful chemicals that cigarettes do. Well, you don't have to imagine it. It exists.

These cigarettes are the most innovative and promising smoking cessation product yet invented.

So public health officials and anti-tobacco activists are all in favor of this life-saving innovation,

right? Actually, they're almost all totally against it. Why? Because incredibly, they make no

substantial distinction between e-cigarettes and real cigarettes, even though they are completely

different products. To begin with, e-cigarettes aren't cigarettes. They contain no tobacco.

Instead, a liquid containing nicotine derived from tobacco leaves is vaporized, and users of e-cigarettes

inhale that vapor. Vapor, mind you, not smoke. This is significant because the real harm from tobacco

comes from the combustion process, which releases hundreds of toxic compounds known as tar.

Since e-cigarettes have no tobacco and no combustion, they release no tar. This makes them,

according to Britain's Department of Health, at least 95% less harmful than tobacco cigarettes.

E-cigarettes do contain nicotine, an addictive drug. However, there's little evidence that nicotine

alone is bad for you, making it similar to, say, caffeine, a drug used every day by millions of

people. Brad Rodu, an oral cancer specialist at the University of Louisville, put it this way.

I love coffee, and I'm sure I could get caffeine if I smoked my coffee beans. But I would be

paying a much different price in overall health if I did. In other words, when it comes to addictive

substances like caffeine or nicotine, it isn't the addictive substance that's harmful, it's how

it's delivered. As South African psychiatrist Mike Russell said about cigarettes, people smoke

for the nicotine, but they die from the tar. And again, there's no tar in e-cigarettes.

Does this all mean that e-cigarettes are completely safe? Of course not. Nothing is completely safe.

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