About 37.8 million adults smoke in the U.S., and e-cigarettes may provide a safer way for them to get their fix.
There’s now a “virtual consensus” that e-cigarettes are substantially less harmful than smoking, said David Hammond, a public health researcher at the University of Waterloo. The CDC and the American Cancer Society both say as much. And in January, a panel of experts convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a review of about 800 scientific studies on e-cigarettes. One conclusion: “E-cigarettes are likely to be far less harmful than combustible tobacco cigarettes.”