At some point we need to either ban cigarettes or call off the fundamentalist ranting about smokers.  Yes, smoking is bad for you, everyone knows that by now, but having the state of California increase taxes on cigarette smokers - making the state government even more reliant on them - while they use some of that money for anti-smoking campaigns, which means the government now wants to kill the revenue source it is making itself more reliant on, is the kind of thing only...well... progressive government would do.

If you have a risk factor for lung cancer, smoking is going to make it worse.  Sure, if you have a rick factor you may get lung cancer whether you smoke or not and 90% of smokers will never get lung cancer, but the multi-billion dollar marketing campaign against smoking doesn't like to engage in science or fact - yet an "e-cigarette" would seem to be a happy medium for everyone, right? They mimic mimic the look, feel and taste of traditional cigarettes, and deliver the dose of nicotine a smoker craves without most of the 10,000 chemicals in cigarettes. That has to be better, for people who just will not quit. 

Nope, those are no good either, because it is not really a health issue, despite what they claim, it is a fundamentalist crusade - and science is always the first to fall while the FDA is first to be ignored in those kinds of fights.

Read about the new front in the nanny culture war: 

E-Cigarette Bans Are Absurd by Cameron English, policymic.com