I think most people are weary of touting any potential long term benefits because there's significant reason to believe that there are still long term negative effects.

If your options are: Do a bad thing, do a slightly less bad thing, or just don't do either of them, doing neither is always going to be the preferred option.

Also there's a growing body of literature that suggests people with certain cognitive or social problems self-select for habitual use of nicotine. Longitudinal studies in California and Oregon have shown adolescent smoking strongly correlates with long-term high-risk behaviors, such as drug dealing and domestic violence. Many other international studies have revealed strong correlations between cigarette smoking and schizophrenia. Even if e-cigarettes weren't directly harmful (and make no mistake, they are) it would still be a great idea to charge their users higher premiums.

Having been around a lot of schizophrenic people before, smoking is most definitely more common among them over the general public. That's anecdotal but it's also a confirmed fact that applies to people with any mental health problems. I always figured the correlation was from self-medicating and social factors.

Maybe I'm just missing something, but you're referring to studies on cigarette smoking correlating with harmful behavior, where I'm not sure you can draw a parallel to any correlations with vaping? After all, nicotine is a shared ingredient, a lot of stuff isn't.

Pretty sure folks aren't self-medicating on radon and ash, Kroko.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2040350/

So there's obviously more to tobacco than the nicotine that contributes to its potential for harmful self-medication. Properties like helping mask the odor are irrelevant in the context of our discussion, but properties like making nicotine delivery more efficient and the possibility of increasing the addictiveness of tobacco are not. Be that as it may, I believe there is enough doubt against drawing a direct parallel from tobacco smoking correlating with harmful behavior to vaping doing so as well. I understand the key role of nicotine, but such effects might at the very least be less pronounced with vaping.

I know a couple of people who tried vaping (or "smoking e-cigarettes" as I like to call it). They both said they never got the same kick out of it. That could be down to confirmation bias, habits and what have you, but it's interesting wrt this topic. Not factually interesting, as it's again purely anecdotal, just throwing it out there.

Edit: my whole post was in the same font size as the quote at first.

I wouldn't know anything about a person with mental illness being prone to habitual smoking or substance abuse...