Smoke without fire

I have what could reasonably be described as conflicting opinions on smoking. On the one hand, I've never smoked in my life. My g/f and I don't allow people to smoke in our house, banishing them to the garden if they want a ciggy, and if it were up to me everybody would give up smoking completely.

On the other hand, I can't stand the smoking ban. Don't get me wrong, I see the benefits of course, and suspect I hardly need to go through them fully here – the lack of stink on one's clothes/hair, the removal of the effects of passive smoking from the pub's employees and punters etc etc. But it's not that I have a problem with. Firstly, there's the fundamental nanny-state mollycoddling in banning an elective and legal activity, which should not be up to government. I just don't like that on a fundamental level.

Secondly there's the sort of smoker/non-smoker apartheid which has developed as smokers huddle outside pubs, indulging their habit in all weathers while the non-smokers either have to come outside and breathe their smoke anyway or abandon their conversation while they remain inside. Then there's the smell – pubs now smell of farts and sweat, which cigarette smoke used to mask rather effectively.

Now it seems that even e-cigarettes are coming into the line of fire of certain health groups. I think they're marvellous things, and I've never used one. My partner's mother, a committed smoker all her adult life despite a heart attack and two hospitalisations for breathing difficulties, had just these past few days managed to get off real cigarettes completely by using them. Eight days without smoking when she'd previously been singularly incapable of giving up.

They smell of warm candy floss rather than smoke. They contain no tar. There's no risk of passive smoking – they emit water vapour, not smoke. They allow people to stay together inside. In theory at least. (Recently a workmate of mine was told by an All Bar One manager that it was 'company policy' that e-cigs are forbidden in their bars. I can find no mention of this on their website or within their corporate communications – he and his companions chose to leave, taking their business with them. I just don't understand that attitude. The pub trade in Britain is in crisis, you'd think they'd welcome something which encourages people back inside.)

It also appears that the BMA is not taken with them. Despite Professor John Britton, the Royal College of Physicians' tobacco advisory group leader, pointing out that nicotine itself is no more hazardous than caffeine, the BMA want them 'heavily regulated' because they 'don't know they're safe'. There's also a concern that they could 'legitimise something that looks like smoking'. Well smoking real cigarettes is already confirmed as unsafe, hugely so. It also looks exactly like smoking, and is legitimate. So what would they rather have, in the absence of being able to simply make everybody stop completely?

I was, I'll confess, unaware that they could be legally sold to kids – that certainly should be regulated because anything which plays a role in starting children smoking should most wholeheartedly be discouraged. But most adults – almost a million in Britain already, apparently – buy them, I strongly suspect, as part of an effort to at least cut down on the real thing. That has certainly been the empirical evidence I've seen – plenty of my workmates now hardly smoke real fags at all, and a few have stopped altogether, thanks to e-cigs.

If a real hard-core smoker like my g/f's mum can give up because of them (and one of her friends now wants to try to do the same thing, having seen her success), then anybody can. You'd have thought the BMA, and others like them, would encourage something like that.