It's easy to foresee, though, if you take note of what has gone before. Historian Victoria Berridge - in her book Marketing Health: Smoking and the Discourse of Public Health in Britain, 1945-2000 - was very clear about the principle. They're quite simply not going to be allowed.
The battle lines were drawn - as [former ASH chief in 1977] Simpson put it, "If there was such a thing as a safer cigarette, then there would be no need for ASH". The style and agenda of the organization was bound up with its stance of opposition to reduction of risk and in favour of its elimination. To achieve this necessarily pitted itself against industry interests, but also against sections of government which saw the way forward in cooperation and voluntary regulation.These are the scriptures which public health ideologues adhere to, and have done for decades. They ain't letting an impudent upstart like e-cigs break their rent-seeking modus operandi anytime soon. Not while the pursuit of prohibition pays.
E-cigs will continue to be maligned, lied about, attacked and prohibited for the simple reason that many tobacco controllers are not in the game for health reasons. It's never really been about health, y'see. They are merely perpetuating their own self-enrichment while they can still get away with it, aided by the most incompetent politicians this - or any other first world country - has ever been condemned to suffer.
May God rot them, every one.
