Instead, promoting electronic cigarettes to smokers should be a public health priority. Given that the direct medical costs of smoking are estimated to be more than $130 billion per year, along with $150 billion annually in productivity losses from premature deaths, getting more smokers to switch would result in significant cost savings — as well as almost half a million lives saved each year.

We should make e-cigarettes accessible to smokers by eschewing hefty taxes, if we tax them at all, and offering free samples and starter kits. Those kits, which contain a battery, a charger and nicotine-liquid cartridges, typically run between $30 and $90. To reduce the hurdle to initiation, any payer of smoking-related costs — health insurers, Veterans Affairs medical centers, companies that offer smoking-cessation programs for their employees, Medicare, Medicaid — should make the starter kits available gratis. Users should have to pay for their own replacement cartridges, but those are much cheaper than cigarette packs.

Also, we should allow and welcome public vaping in adult environments such as bars, restaurants and workplaces. Vapers would serve as visual prompts for smokers to ask about vaping and, ideally, ditch traditional cigarettes and take up electronic ones instead.