a unique safety profile: if wine (or aspirin) were to be introduced today, and equally widely used, and equally closely monitored, it is impossible that it would achieve the same safety profile at this point in time. We regard wine or aspirin as harmless but needing sensible precautions in use: and there is nothing wrong with that at all.
The power of the web
There is a very large network of online e-cigarette consumers who are not just unusually engaged but strongly committed to supporting the community, product availability, product development, product choices and usage methods, community activism, and the reporting and discussion of health effects. The old way of describing it would have been that it is a fan base; but that wouldn’t really be accurate as the community encompasses all aspects of the activity and includes professionals such as doctors, consultants (consultant physicians), senior nurses, lawyers, chemists, and engineers along with journalists, politicians, and activists among the very large and rapidly-growing user community. This is a natural feature when you consider that eventually it may include as much as a 20% cross-section of the population. The forums, social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, the consumer associations, and the vapemeets (club meetings and conventions) are the components of the community’s communication network; nothing like it exists for any similar consumer product area - there is no
similar machinery for wine, coffee, chocolate, tea, cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco, or cream cakes come to that; and certainly not for NRTs or other pharmaceuticals. A forum may have 4,000 posts per day so it is quite clear there is an unusual level of engagement within this community. Every possible aspect of product choice and use is monitored closely by hundreds of thousands of people interacting closely. With 3 million ecig users in the USA, another 3 million plus in Europe, and up to 3 million more in the ROTW - probably approaching a userbase of 10 million now - nothing escapes notice: there are no secrets. Even the health effects of smoking cessation are better reported within this community than anywhere else. Some knowledge acquisition is seen here before anywhere else; for example, the factor-10 difference in individual tolerance to nicotine was reported here first; the effects of nicotine on diabetes and thyroid patients; how smoking cessation symptoms interact with nicotine delivery systems; and even unreported effects of smoking cessation such as possible serious mood-altering effects of cleaning materials; see: http://www.e-cigaretteforum.com/forum/health-safety-esmoking/3305-list-symptoms-whenquitting-tobacco-changing-ecigarette. html