What do you think is more harmful: Smoking a cigarette and inhaling the hundreds of toxic chemical by-products? Or inhaling a nicotine vapour without them?

If you think the latter option is safer then not only do you display common sense. You are also on the side of science and overwhelming evidence.

Practically all credible health experts are convinced that so-called e-cigarettes are safer than smoking. One can only wonder why it took so long to allow the domestic sale of nicotine e-cigarettes.

The government’s announcement of legalisation last week was as welcome as it was overdue.

When The New Zealand Initiative first started talking about e-cigarettes, the debate was mainly around safety. But as we argued in The Health of State, many of the claims about riskiness were overblown or completely misrepresented. 

Besides, as long as conventional cigarettes are available at any corner dairy, it was nonsensical that e-cigarettes – as a much less harmful alternative – remained restricted.

Even when there was near universal agreement about the relative safety of e-cigarettes some public health experts still believed access should be restricted to pharmacies as they were worried that they could be a gateway to smoking.

Again, there is no good evidence to believe that. On the contrary, if you make the purchase of e-cigarettes more difficult, you may well render them useless as a cessation or harm reduction tool. In our submission to the Ministry of Health, we successfully warned that overregulation could undo all the good that legalisation would otherwise achieve.

Finally, despite strong demand for e-cigarettes from smokers who are motivated to quit, some public health experts remain sceptical about the effectiveness of e-cigarettes as a cessation tool.

However, traditional cessation methods replace the nicotine from smoking, but not the behaviour. E-cigarettes are a game-changer. They provide the user with nicotine, combined with a physical act similar to smoking, without the harmful toxins that are released with combustible cigarettes.

How do we know that e-cigarettes could be more successful than other quit smoking devices? Well, the most resounding endorsement comes from users themselves. Through word of mouth and personal experience, the demand for e-cigarettes has grown in New Zealand despite there being heavy restrictions on availability and little advertising.

E-cigarettes are an example of on-the-ground experience, quality evidence, and pragmatism prevailing over elite opinion on how best to reduce the harm from smoking.

Legalisation is a win for smokers, and a win for ground-up policy-making