The Food and Drug Administration has been on the warpath against e-cigarettes, going so far this June as to try to ban Juul products from the marketplace. A federal appeals court stayed the edict, and the agency eventually admitted it had not done a thorough review of the company’s offerings.

The FDA purports to act in the name of public heath, particularly when it comes to vaping by teenagers, but it’s actually doing the bidding of anti-nicotine extremists who, in their zeal to outlaw tobacco and punish its purveyors, refuse to acknowledge that e-cigarettes are not nearly as dangerous as traditional smoking. These overly aggressive efforts to eliminate e-cigarettes could undermine smoking cessation efforts, imperiling public health in the long run.

“We do know that e-cigarettes — as a general class — have markedly less risk than a combustible cigarette product,” Brian King, who heads the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, told The Associated Press this week. Yet, thanks to an avalanche of attacks on the vaping industry, polls show only a small minority of Americans understand that traditional cigarettes pose a far greater health problem than e-cigarettes.

“I’m fully aware,” Mr. King told the wire service “of the misperceptions that are out there and aren’t consistent with the known science.”

— Tribune News Service