[jgroome]

>What's the problem with recreational ingestion of nicotine? It's a light stimulant; I'm not sure why this is any worse than caffeine. And certainly isn't worse than other medications like opiates or amphetamines.

You're not wrong. But that's the problem - it's not enough to say "sure X is harmful, but so's Y, so it's alright". Ingesting nicotine by itself is a hell of a lot less harmful than taking it with tar and everything else that comes in a normal cigarette. But it's still a highly addictive substance, and personally, my concern is that marketing something highly addictive to the public (and, dare I say it, young people) is really seedy.

[Semaphor]

> But it's still a highly addictive substance

I'd call it slightly addictive. It seems it only becomes highly addictive in concert with other ingredients of tobacco smoke, at least that's what the German Wikipedia [1] has and it references [2,3,4,5,6,7] (I didn't read those myself as I can't say I understand their terminology)

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotin

[2] http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v30/n4/full/1300586a.html

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9089846

[4] http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_la...

[5] http://ntr.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/1/75.short

[6] http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v31/n8/full/1300987a.html

[7] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53018/

[seanmcdirmid]

But its not addictive. I totally wish it was, but its not. The addictive part about smoking is psychological, placing the nicotine into a pill, gum, or a vapour pipe doesn't really help you stop smoking.

[jasomill]

It sure did for me — I went from a twenty year long, two pack a day cigarette habit to e-cigarettes a month ago. I immediately preferred vaporization to smoking, and honestly haven't wanted an ordinary cigarette since.