Another day, another story about e-cigarettes.
Actually there are several articles, including opinion pieces, but the one I'm focussing on concerns the Royal Environmental Health Institute for Scotland.
Speaking ahead of the organisation's annual conference in Edinburgh president Colin Wallace said:
"We fully back the decision to ban e-cigarettes from Commonwealth Games venues but it needs to go further."
Further? Yes, the REHI wants the ban extended to advertising near Glasgow 2014 venues.
The Herald asked Forest to respond and records my quote as follows:
Simon Clark of the smokers' group Forest said the government should resist the temptation to over-regulate the use and promotion of e-cigarettes saying there is no evidence they are harmful to the user or anyone else.
"Banning e-cigarettes in non-smoking environments makes no sense because the product is very different to tobacco. There's no combustion, no smoke, and no evidence that vaping encourages anyone to start smoking," he said.
"Nicotine can be addictive but on its own it's no more harmful than caffeine. Politicians need to regulate accordingly.
ASH Scotland is absent from reports of this story, which appears in the several Scottish newspapers, which is a pity. I would love to have read their response.
As I reported at the weekend, ASH Scotland's current position is curious. They oppose a ban on the use of e-cigarettes in public places yet support bans on e-cigarettes in, er, public places, including the Commonwealth Games.
According to chief executive Sheila Duffy "There's not enough evidence of harm at this stage to include them in the ban on smoking tobacco in enclosed public places."
Yet she supports prohibition "because the devices could undermine the smoking ban by causing confusion about whether a customer is puffing on a real cigarette".
See: ASH Scotland's Kafkaesque position on electronic cigarettes