"The rapid uptake of electronic cigarettes has been a consumer-led self-help public health movement (Stimson & Costall, 2014) with no expenditure of healthcare resources, and has been met with neglect and sometimes antipathy from many public health experts and tobacco control organisations who clearly do not have ‘ownership’ of the innovation. The public health response to regain ownership has coalesced around the precautionary principle. Hence the public health discourse has mainly focused on potential use of e-cigarettes by young people, their potential as a gateway to smoking, and fear that they might undermine the ‘de-normalisation’ of smoking by ‘re-normalising it’. Few public health experts have been engaged in supporting and promoting this grass roots movement, despite the fact that it accords with one of the basic principles of public health as outlined in the WHO Ottawa Charter for Health – that ‘Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health…’ (WHO, 1986). As has been noted ‘This seems to be exactly what electronic cigarette consumers are doing – taking control of things that determine their health’ (Stimson, 2014)." - Disruptive innovations: The rise of the electronic cigarette
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