Vaping is at least “95 per cent safer” than smoking cigarettes

See The freedom to save your life by Matt Ridley. Excerpt:

"The vaping revolution took the world by surprise. Invented in China in 2006, the e-cigarette has caused massive declines in smoking in Britain — more than almost any other country — because of an early decision by the Cameron government to resist calls to ban it. It is the reason we have the lowest cigarette consumption per capita in the G7, and the second lowest in Europe, and one of the lowest incidences of lung cancer.

More than three million people in this country now vape; the vast majority of these (97-99 per cent) were smokers when they started vaping, and about half have given up smoking altogether. Vaping spread by word of mouth to eager smokers who wanted to quit but found it hard. E-cigarettes are now the most popular and most successful way of quitting tobacco, and are putting stop-smoking services out of business.

The Department of Health got the point, saying in 2017: “We will help people quit smoking by permitting innovative technologies that minimise the risk of harm. We will maximise the availability of safer alternatives to smoking”. But, then, in response to the EU Tobacco Products Directive, it banned advertising of e-cigarettes, and mandated excessively small refill bottles and low nicotine limits. Thus, the opportunity for competition and consumer choice to drive innovation in harm reduction is increasingly stifled, even in Britain, in favour of paternalistic regulation premised on “nanny knows best”, and the fossilised straitjackets of regulation.

The relative safety of smoking and vaping is beyond doubt. The dangerous stuff in a cigarette is not the nicotine, but the products of combustion. Levels of all toxicants are far lower in vapour than smoke, and clinical trials show that vapers quickly become indistinguishable from non-smokers on most indicators of risk and ill health. The widely quoted “95 per cent safer” figure, from the Royal College of Physicians, is almost certainly an underestimate of the difference."