If someone is driving a SUV down the sidewalk I would probably call the police. The EPA is legally empowered to deal with air pollution, sure we carve out exceptions for the common good, but the default is not dump whatever you want into the air.
Yes, but for better or worse[0], smoking is considered common good. Here we're talking about replacing smoking, which is clearly very harmful, by e-cigarettes, which are maybe somewhat but insignificantly harmful. The cost-benefit analysis of that alone[1] should convince everyone to cheerfully advocate for them.
In the course of this discussion thread, we've jumped from the danger of e-cig vapor (which is nil) to the danger of pure nicotine (which is also nil) and now we're talking about pollution. Can't we just agree that those are three separate issues (two of which are non-issues, and third isn't really discussed by people right now)? So far everything is showing that e-cigs are a neglible hazard to smokers and their surroundings. We should be happy we've found a good alternative for the decades-old problem, instead of trying to destroy it by overblowing its negative effects by orders of magnitude.
[1] - I haven't seen any analysis about potential of e-cigarette smoke becoming a significant pollutant; it most likely won't be in terms of particulate matter, but maybe the smoke itself is bad for atmosphere. I don't know. But even if, that's a discussion about environmental impact (and a one that no one is having right now), not about direct health effects.
Please read the entire article to see why this is a non-issue. Can't access the paper to determine just how old the "children" are in this study, but given that you absorb only 1 mg of nicotine from breathing in smoke of a 12mg-nicotine cigarette[0], I'd again treat nicotine poisoning as something not relevant to smoking in the real world.
What area are you in that you are worried about airborne nicotine building up to fatal levels? If there is that little airflow, you should be more worried about suffocation.
Do you also apply this sense of morality onto yourself and the damage you might cause other people? Because in that case, get. the hell. off. my planet.
Safe, as long as you're not boiling down a pack of cigarettes and precipitating out all of the nicotine in order to then deliberately poison a child, yes. Pure nicotine is absolutely lethal. It's also hard to come by unless you make your own - which you'd only do if you wanted to poison someone.
