For anybody else, we recommend against vaping for 2 reasons: 1. If they are adults they can ignore our advice anyway. I ignore advice all the time. 2. If we recommend otherwise, we make it harder to hit the FDA over the head for NOT comparing vaping to smoking, but rather they keep comparing it to quitting successfully by other means. Which most of us already tried. Hence we don't want vaping taken away from us.
As for why not to leave this to medical professionals, I don't need a prescription for Starbucks, and caffeine is comparable to nicotine in the quantities found in e-cig vapor. I can decide I like the effects of coffee on my mind and body without a prescription.
I have no one on ignore and with a forum moderated like this one, I would be very unlikely to put someone on ignore.
I read this yesterday and again today (your post).
I saw / see nothing to discourage everyone (over 18) from enjoying vaping.
Your first point applies to people under 18. Just as when many of us were under 18, and being sold lies by the adult portion of society, we decided to ignore their advice and try smoking. Many years later, some of us were in the neighborhood of, 'oh my god, they were right, I should've never tried that, I'm so sad now to be a smoker.' And others of us were in some sort of deniability that allowed us to maintain the habit and be rather prideful in the fact that we choose to smoke, and to some degree enjoy it.
Your second point is, to me, a bit of a non sequitur. I hear you saying that in order for eCigs not to be taken away from us (and I'm assuming you mean as a perfectly legal item), then we must not recommend vaping to anyone other than smokers because FDA will see what we are doing and rigorously challenge us (the entire eCig community) on what it is we are up to - encouraging people to get into an addiction that they don't need if they don't already have (from smoking). And to me, that is not any one person's call in the eCig community unless they are something akin to expert medical professional who is somehow (I would say magically) able to maintain a sense of independent, unbiased professionalism. Right now, I don't believe those exist, or if they do, they are not without heavy criticism from the extreme element on either side of this larger debate.
IMO, the more people vaping, the merrier. Especially if eCigs are relatively harmless and if, in current times, the anecdotal evidence (at the very least) supports the claim of 'relatively harmless.' Currently, I'm not sure if I can think of a substance on this planet that is 'entirely harmless' and that includes air and water. Though with air and water, in some sort of pure form, I'd have pretty much no solid argument against it being 'entirely harmless,' but I'm not in contact with people who breath pure air / drink pure water.
Therefore, I feel strongly that relatively harmless outweighs 'potential for serious harm' especially if that potential is in same paragraph of 'unknown effects' or 'we just aren't sure.' Cause I could just as easily (really easy, mind you) make that case about anything - i.e. working, eating, exercising, etc. If I said there is potentially serious harm to eating because we don't know the long term effects from it, people might disagree with it, and exercise some sense of deniability. But I'd be able to fall back on the FACT that everyone that has ever eaten on this planet, has died. There are no exceptions to this fact that I'm aware of. And even with that, there would be denial of some sorts, and from pretty much everyone, including me. I'm still going to eat, even while the fact is observably true. I also purposely chose the one that has the least degree of truth in my mind - that is, it could be food that we eat that is causing long term effect of serious harm that leads to death. But, I do think there is around .00001% degree of truth to that claim. With exercise and working, I'd go above that percentage and say there is higher degree of truth to claims of 'potentially serious harm' in effect from those activities.
So, I think with vaping and all current studies I'm aware of (which might be few compared to others), I'm under impression there is degree of truth to the claim that there is (in fact) long term serious harm to continual use with eCigs. And currently that would show up to me as around 1%, possibly less. As is akin to breathing not so pure air in or near a major U.S. city. Then take into account that this vaper might be living in a U.S. city, eating foods which aren't entirely health, drinking water that isn't entirely healthy, thinking thoughts that aren't entirely healthy, working in a job or working in a way that isn't entirely healthy and so and and so forth; that I think at some point that person is going to die. And die a vaper. And then on hindsight, we'll plausibly be able to find something, anything, in their system that possibly lead to their death and is correlated from that which is found in eLiquid.
Which that right there ought to tell you that no one should ever vape anything.
Or you will die.