Let me get this straight:
The lady is a smoker, i.e. she inhales tobacco smoke. Which contains nicotine plus a lot of harmful substances.
People smoke for nicotine but they die from the tar. (Professor Michael Russell, 1976)
Now, she considers consuming nicotine harmful - even if it is consumed without the tar and the other harmful substances in tobacco smoke.
Thus, she prefers to smoke on and off, and to consume the nicotine with the tar and the other harmful substances in tobacco smoke when she does consume it.
Which she frequently does. And now does full time again.
Now, I am not going to say what I think of this. After all, the lady is your sister
But I do agree: "thank you for that, popular opinion..." This is precisely what the ANTZ are trying to achieve: continued smoking. After all, according to those who make their money off the smoking gravy train: "nicotine is oh-so-harmful if consumed by itself. So you might as well smoke"
Uhm....
Say, would using an e-cig "once in a while" be an option?
/edit:
Quote from the a.m. source:
And this source is not an e-cig publication.
Instead, it is ASH UK, the Action on Smoking and Health.
Is is one of the few public health organizations who managed to get their heads out of their backsides and now embrace harm reduction.
I believe, as far as she is concerned, it is a combination of feeling that nicotine addiction is harmful (insofar as addiction to anything is considered harmful) and fear that the e-cig is not really safer than smoking. Tbh I don't believe her husband is being too helpful on that last point...
I agree, the logic for switching to e-cig use is solid, but it is quite difficult to change age-old beliefs. I was taught throughout elementary school that nicotine is deadly. For me it's not too difficult for me to overturn lifelong beliefs because I have always been naturally skeptical and distrusting of authority, and I tend toward always questioning others and myself to seek the truth. For others, however, it's not so simple to "unbelieve" what they were taught.
Fwiw, my mother went out of her way to buy her a full ego kit, and continues to try to talk her into using it. I bring it up now and then, but I am the baby in the family so my words are a bit less convincing here at the end of the day though, I believe it will require a shift in popular opinion to get people like her to fully switch to vaping. She, along with many others, would have to see it as less of a "fringe" phenomenon to really take it seriously.
I never said my sister and I agree on everything, that's for sure