ASI Executive Director, Sam Bowman, discusses e-cigarette regulation on IBTimes

Sam Bowman argued that we need to support healthier alternatives to drink, drugs and smoking in an article on the IBTimes this week. The piece reasons that:

If we are becoming able to invent safer alternatives to tobacco, alcohol and drugs, we need a regulatory system that fosters these innovations. This requires a complete rethink of what we've got, a move from the precautionary policy to so-called "permissionless innovation" where new products are assumed to be acceptable for sale, with appropriate caveats, without overwhelming evidence otherwise.

As with environmental rules, public health regulations should encourage safer new inventions that people will adopt of their own free will. Abstinence-only public health policy obviously doesn't work. If we let it, new technology might.

Read the whole article here.