Of all the arguments that have been used to support vaping, the most prominent and perhaps the most compelling has been the idea of “tobacco harm reduction.”

Now, harm reduction itself is a well-established paradigm in public health. Essentially, its premise is that it is not realistic or feasible to make people abandon or abstain from certain practices, and instead of forcing them to do so, we should seek to reduce the harms associated with those practices—and to optimize health outcomes for the people who engage in them.