What's your stance on nicotine gum or pills/lozenges? As far as my understanding went, it wasn't clear those things were exceptionally unhealthy, although I'd love to update my stance if someone can provide me with evidence.
There is some regulatory nuance I believe that makes them harder to buy than regular vaping products but I forget what it is — a simple fact though is that the social aspect of smoking breaks, smoking at bars, the habit of smoking is a huge draw and it's hard to replicate that with gum.
The best product to solve the nicotine crisis is a smart device that gradually lowers the nicotine invisibly to the user over a 3-6-12 month period. This isn't a super hard problem, the FDA and the market is just too non technical to execute.
We already had that in Swedish snus and Obama chose to tax it to death to help the domestic tobacco industry out. Not only is snus not dangerous, but you can quit by just leaving the sachet in your mouth for longer and longer periods. That's how I quit, and I haven't had a cigarette in 11 years or a snus in 8.
The problem with medicalized nicotine gums, etc. is their absurdly high pricing.
It also has the same flavouring problem as vapes (anecdotal paraphrasing from a friend: "I could never smoke but I use Snus because I think it tastes nice").
People who want to taper off nicotine using vapes can do this manually, and many do. I find this proposed solution overengineered.
Of course it could be enforced. "Smart" vapes could be regulated as medical devices, available only by prescription and used under the supervision of doctors. I think that would greatly reduce their appeal as a smoking replacement with a low barrier to entry though; other nicotine delivery systems to aid in quitting smoking were available decades before vaping.
Is it, though? The psychology of knowing vs not knowing that your nicotine concentration is being ramped down over time could be significant. For instance, I can easily imagine being far more willing to vape more on a hard day of work because "my nicotine is being ramped down anyway, so it's not as bad".
Whereas Juul was getting kids to TAKE up vaping, and add new smokers to the market.
So overall, pills/lozenges was doing good for society, and Juul was not.