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Cigarettes still make up the lion’s share of the tobacco market. They represent the highest amount of risk, addiction, and death. And yet, a good deal of time is spent making sure that all tobacco products are treated as equally dangerous. At times, this effort can even supersede anti-smoking efforts with time spent telling people using other tobacco products — like chew and hookah — that they aren’t using something safer.

Take hookah in particular. The smoke is cooled in water before entering the lungs and possesses a lower concentration of tobacco (often replaced by molasses or honey). Hookah, like any use of tobacco, has consequences. However, studies find that it is a little less dangerous than smoking. And while 45 minutes of hookah use often involves 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke as a cigarette, hookah use is not something individuals do everywhere the way that they might with cigarette smoking. As well, hookah use often involves sharing, so the full load of smoke isn’t necessarily taken by a single individual.

The point of all of this is to say that if time could be spent getting people off cigarettes or off hookah, that time should be spent fighting cigarettes. To take things even further, if someone is going to use a tobacco product, better they use the less dangerous one. But this isn’t how anti-smokers perceive the world. The FDA in particular is not willing to say that any form of tobacco is more or less harmful than any other form.

This is why electronic cigarettes are such a thorn in their side. It’s one thing to say that hookahs — which might be 10 or 20% less harmful than cigarettes — are as harmful as cigarettes. But electronic cigarettes are rapidly looking like they are closer to 95 to 99% less harmful. To make matters worse for the FDA, while hookah and cigarettes are likely to have similar harm profiles, any harm truly caused by electronic cigarettes is not likely to be all that similar to that of smoking.

So while more than 400,000 people die each year as a result of smoking, the FDA and many anti-smoking groups are spending time claiming that electronic cigarettes might be just as bad — maybe even worse. The problem is that this does one of two things. It either ruins the credibility of e-cigs if people believe these groups, or it ruins the credibility of these groups if people believe e-cigs are much less harmful.

While these groups might be okay with ruining the credibility of e-cigs, this only makes reduced harm less of an option for smokers. While the average consumer is proving resistant to misinformation about electronic cigarettes, legislators seem less so. If local, state, and national legislators enact policy based on these slanted views, they only ruin what has rapidly proven a successful replacement for smoking.

Ruining their own credibility only means that their justifiable and commendable anti-smoking efforts are more likely to fall on deaf ears.

The belief that all tobacco is equally harmful is obviously incorrect. Nothing is exactly as harmful as anything else — especially when looking are harm to unique individuals with unique body chemistry. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize this as a problem.

So it seems likely these groups will only slow down e-cigs and hurt themselves.