Financial Analysts Recognize Value of Electronic Cigarettes for Smoking Cessation/Reduction, While Anti-Smoking Groups Continue to Ignore the Evidence or Pretend that It Doesn't Exist

While many anti-smoking groups and government agencies deny that there is any evidence that electronic cigarettes can be helpful with smoking cessation or reduction, financial analysts now recognize the value of these products, based on overwhelming evidence of their effectiveness: the actual sales data.

In an article in the Winston-Salem Journal, Richard Craver cites financial analysts who predict that electronic cigarettes are so effective smoking cessation/reduction tool that they will put a large dent in cigarette sales, enough to lower tobacco company payments to the states under the Master Settlement Agreement.

According to the article: "The swelling popularity of electronic cigarettes may add to the regulatory and revenue tension between tobacco manufacturers and states. ... So much so that Herzog said recently in a note to investors that e-cig sales could grow fast enough to affect the payments states receive from the landmark Master Settlement Agreement. ...sales of e-cigs are about $300 million a year and the products have about 2.5 million users, according to Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association. There are projections of $1 billion in annual sales within a few years, Herzog said...".

The Rest of the Story

The anti-smoking groups fail to accept the evidence because they don't want to accept it. They are against electronic cigarettes on ideological grounds, and no amount of scientific evidence is going to get in their way. Not even these sales figures and projections, which demonstrate that smokers are finding these products to be enormously helpful for smoking cessation or reduction - so much so that electronic cigarettes, unlike any previous smoking cessation product, may actually produce a substantial dent in cigarette sales. The reduction in cigarette use is projected to be large enough to actually result in reduced payments to the states under the MSA.

Electronic cigarettes are projected to substantially reduce cigarette sales because they are the first product on the market that addresses both the pharmacologic and physical/behavioral/social aspects of the smoking addiction. It is precisely because the mimic smoking that these products are so widely acceptable among smokers and why they are so effective in substituting for cigarettes.

Ironically, it is precisely because these products mimic smoking that anti-smoking groups can't stand their thought, even though they are demonstrably safer than cigarettes and are literally saving people's lives.

Sadly, the scientific evidence is of little importance in the modern-day anti-smoking movement. Ideology trumps science in the movement in 2012.