Actually, I think it's these "scientists" you allude to that are causing the problems to begin with. The apparatchiks on the local "health" boards wouldn't pick on ecigs if they were not being told by a certain "distinguished professor" about all the "science" he's done and all the "dangers" and "concerns" he has. How is a bureaucrat with no scientific training to know that the illustrious scientists at official organizations such as CDC, FDA, and WHO and at respected medical organizations like AMA, ALA, AHA, ACS are gushing pseudoscientific slurry. Who is he to believe? The renowned academic and "public health" "expert" with a pristine CV as tall as the ivory tower from whence he spawned who says these things are dangerous, for the children, and should be banned? Or some sellout European doctor financed by the industry claiming ecigs help smokers quit. Perhaps the little known professor bought by a ecig proponent group and funded by the ecig industry who said there's nothing to worry about?
These are salient and correct points, obviously, but I come back again to the issue of willful ignorance. Not just ignorance of what vapor products are, how they work, and who uses them (which is bad enough), but ignorance of how to discern fact from innuendo, and how to engage in a logically sound thought process. We have journalists and politicians, right across the country, who are failing spectacularly in this regard.
Suppose you're a city councilman, and some guy from an alphabet soup "public health" organization, with a fancy-sounding degree and an impressive-sounding list of credentials, is testifying in support of a public vaping ban. He's rattling off the usual arguments about "these things are unregulated, we really don't know what's in them, and this study by Such-and-Such State University found detectable amounts of Scary-Sounding Chemicals 1, 2, and 3 in the vapor."
In order for this guy's testimony to be accepted by the council, he has to provide copies of his reference materials. It is the job of the individual council members, in their capacity as stewards of the public trust, to review those materials and check their veracity against the claims made by the guy who used them as the basis of his testimony. This is where we run into trouble when local officials have no idea how logic and science are supposed to work, and are thus ill-equipped to exercise the skepticism they should be applying to any and all claims made by anyone who testifies in their chamber.
The council members should be asking themselves, and one another, a series of important-yet-basic questions: 1) Do these findings apply equally to all vapor products, or just the ones that Such-and-Such State University chose to test?; 2) Which products were tested, and how long ago?; 3) Are those products still on the market?; 4) Were the "detectable amounts" of Scary Sounding Chemicals 1, 2, and 3 sufficient to cause harm?; 5) Are these amounts of Scary Sounding Chemicals 1, 2, and 3 unique to e-cigarette vapor, or are they present in normal ambient air to begin with?; 6) Was the testing done in such a way that it was a reasonable facsimile of real-world product usage?
As public officials making public health policy, it is an unacceptable abdication of one's responsibilities to their employer (the public) to just take someone's word at face value, irrespective of what fancy-sounding degree they have or for what purportedly eminent "public health" organization they happen to work. In order to discharge this responsibility effectively, you have to know how to think and how to ask questions. If you're just acting as a rubber stamp of approval for someone's political agenda, and you're too dumb to even realize it, you should be in a different line of work, because a group of trained monkeys could do that just as well, and at significantly lower cost to the taxpayer.
