> I'm not a smoker, but I'm all for every smoker around me converting to e-cigs, and even at the "risk" of having some non-smokers start e-cigs it's really a no contest: if some e-cig flavourings are unhealthy, investigate and regulate those, but please please do not stop the transition which is great for absolutely everybody.

You forgot one group, although my guess is that if it's a significant number (I just have anecdata), we'll hear about it soon enough. With all these parties holding interest, they'll be up to their noses in statistics.

It's the group of smokers that are trying to make a healthy life-decision, trying to quit their addiction[0], to quit smoking, but relapse because obviously electronic cigarettes keep both the nicotine addiction and the habit going.

None of the people I know who tried to switch to e-cigs (for health, or any reasons actually) did not relapse to regular cigarettes. Starts with just one, for the flavour (because it does taste better, really does) and after a few weeks you'll never see the e-cig again. I'll ask around to see if any of them still even use the e-cig at all, maybe at home, but I kind of doubt it.

Source: Am smoker and therefore hang out with other smokers outside a lot of the time. I can think of 4 or 5 people I know for which the above story holds, and truly not anybody that permanently switched to e-cigs, or went from e-cigs to full quit.

Not even for half a year or so--which I would otherwise (without e-cigs) consider having "quit" to the extent that keeping it up after that is much more likely.

So among my peers, people "switching" to e-cigs, can basically expect less than half a year of clean lungs before they relapse. Any health benefits of that short period goes up in smoke.

That's what I don't like about e-cigs, it's like twitter-activism, it wastes people's will on something they think is helping, but really just lulls them into a false sense of effort.

Another piece of anecdata: I know a lot more (than 4 or 5) people that actually managed to quit smoking. Now some of them didn't get addicted "real bad" (some people are just less sensitive to addiction), but some of them did, even relapsed some times, but keep on battling. Especially that last group, if they had switched to e-cigs instead, would be back inhaling burned leaves in no time.

But I don't know how significant these experiences are. Maybe e-cigs will help further the social stigma of smoking, the unusualness of it, therefore in the end creating and cultivating an environment in which smokers can more easily kick their habit. But a method to quit smoking, it is not. Especially I have personally, not seen any heavy smoker / addict get any expected health benefits from them.

So if e-cigs are good, they're only for "the greater good", I would never ever recommend a smoker that wants to "switch" to e-cigs for their health. "Just quit", I will tell them, e-cigs are just a temporary stop-gap to feel like you're "doing something good", while in the mean-time keeping your actual addiction alive and kicking. Even trying quitting for real and failing, seems IMO better than that (at least you'll gain experience in battling your willpower).

[0] which is hard, and I'll just say that if you haven't experienced such addiction (and even many smokers and ex-smokers have not), you probably underestimate how it can grind will to dust