What's weird about this to me is I actually thought about vapor smokes about 15 years ago before I ever heard of them (I'm sure many people had the same thought though). I was standing in the fog smoking and I thought to myself, why can't someone invent nicotine through water vapor instead of smoke. Of course not being a scientist or chemist I had no idea if it was possible, and so I never gave it a second thought.
Being a businesss person, I also see this is a good expression of our free market system and how govt. interference isn't always about Democrat vs. Republican vs. independant or whatever, sometimes it's just about lobbyists vs. reality. I think most people can agree that some govt. agencies are not put together correctly (like the FDA) and regardless of what you think about down-sizing, we certainly need to fix these agencies with too much titled power.
Take our food for instance, the whole Nitrates / Unnatural Foods / Preservatives, now I read about the chemicals they add to food, and I have mixed feelings. For the most part, the evidence isn't real solid either way, but what is solid is that AT LEAST SOME food can also cause cancer (Pancreatic cancer studies appear to show an undeniable EXCESSIVE correlation between Nitrates in meat and cancer - like 60% to 80% increase in occurence of people that eat more Nitrates, and this study has been replicated at more than one university). Now I have no idea if we can get most of the nitrates out of the meat (some of it is natural), but I'd think they'd at least try to work on enforcing safer alternatives to the additives that aren't too costly.
What happens is you can get any industry that gets their dirty hands too deep into something, they know if their is a safer alternative their revenues are threatened, so they'd rather be rich and kill us all (it's easy to look the other way when it comes to money, heck we've all been tempted). So then they get their power struggles within the agencies from lobbyists and what not, then in return we basically get poisoned and any product selection is completely limited or non-existent (or costs 3x more because the bad stuff for us is subsidized).
So you have to ask yourself, WTH is the FDA doing. Despite the nitrates thing (which I believe the only thing it does is make the meat look prettier), I just mean in general they can't ever seem to get it right.
Look at all the diet pills and meds they passed that were later recalled and payouts in the hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits. Ummm, recalls on drugs should be fairly rare not an every year occurrence, if they are having to recall stuff because they "just discovered", then we certainly cannot trust their advice on the opposite end of the spectrum. Now I do understand getting RISKY drugs out to the public fast for life threatening or debilitating illness, but come on, they'll approve anything if you got enough lobbyists and people to twist the studies around in your favor. Likewise, just as easily they'll deny anything if it goes against their buddies wallets.
People in power are constantly trying to tilt things to the benefit of their own constituents, the problem is there is a large enough percentage of them that do it without any consideration of others. It's kind of like how we subsidize certain industries, regardless of what you think about subsidies, favoritism is never good in a free-market, this is the perfect example why subsidized favortism never works.
I personally see these companies (at least the good ones) as providing a potentially life-saving device, yet they are under-fire for providing what is almost surely a safer product. All the FDA should be doing is providing a basis of general regulation for the quality of the product, not immediately making statements that are borderline saying "how dangerous these are". Even if they turned out to be dangerous (unlikely), they don't have any info that suggests that yet, so they are obviously jumping the gun for other reasons (lobbyists and pressure from from politicians is my guess).
This experience makes me really see the bad side of our govt., even though their is a good side too.