Keep calm and vape on: UK embraces e-cigarettes, US cautious

While the US scrambles to crack down on vaping, Britain has embraced electronic cigarettes as a powerful tool to help smokers kick the habit.

The Royal College of Physicians explicitly tells doctors to promote e-cigarettes "as widely as possible" to people trying to quit. Public Health England's advice is that vaping carries a small fraction of the risk of smoking.

US public health officials have taken a more wary approach, and have been slow to regulate e-cigarettes. That caution turned to alarm, though, with an explosion in teen vaping, prompting the federal government and some states to take steps to ban fruit and minty flavours that appeal to youths.

And now, with hundreds of U.S. cases of a mysterious lung illness among vapers, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that people consider not using e-cigarettes, especially those with THC, the compound that gives pot its high.

The US reaction is "complete madness," said Dr. John Britton, director of the UK Center for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Nottingham.

"The reality with smoking is, if you tell people to stop vaping, they will go back to tobacco and tobacco kills."
"We have a much more relaxed attitude to people being addicted to nicotine on the basis that nicotine itself isn't particularly hazardous."