The Australian public health industry is overpopulated with intellectual egotists – activists, academics, and bureaucrats who insist they know best for all of us, and brook no disagreement with their prescriptions for dealing with the vices and ills that beset our society.

As far as they are concerned, it’s their way or the highway. Ministers and MPs hang on their every word, or risk being condemned if they deviate from the prescription. Public health policies are made in close consultation with them. Many are treated as unimpeachable oracles of wisdom: Aristotle’s philosopher kings.

Given this prevailing mindset, the public health industry – and I use that word deliberately – is reactionary, set in its ways, and unwilling to accept disruption to their worldview that might actually help achieve the goals they say they aspire to.

This is no more obvious than for the controversial issue of nicotine vaping.

Vaping has been around for over two decades. It involves inhaling a vaporised solution that often (but not always) contains a quantity of nicotine. It is intended, and marketed overseas, as a lower-risk alternative to smokers getting their nicotine fix from a deadly addiction to combustible tobacco cigarettes.

Reputable researchers and medical and scientific groups, notably the Royal College of Physicians and the former Public Health England, have assessed the health risks of vaping, compared to smoking. An expert committee of the RCP concluded, from the available scientific and empirical evidence, that the comparable risks of vaping are up to 95 per cent less than smoking.

That’s not surprising, given the highly toxic cocktail of substances in tobacco smoke, compared to vaping solutions. As a leading international expert in smoking and public health, the late Michael Russell, pointed out decades ago, ‘people smoke for the nicotine, and die from the tar’.

Such scientific insights into the relative risks and benefits of smoking versus vaping have informed government anti-smoking strategies in other Western countries over the last 15 years, most notably the United Kingdom and New Zealand, where vaping has been cautiously embraced in the cause of making those countries smoke-free.

Their influence has been seen in precipitate drops in smoking rates in the UK, and similar trends emerging across the Tasman. But when it comes to being open to the public health possibilities of vaping as a harm reduction and quit-smoking tool, the mindset of the public health industry is as closed as North Korea.

So it is that in Australia, public policy treats vaping as being as bad as smoking, and willingly demonises it as being even more so. Vaping generally is regulated within an inch of its life. Legal nicotine vaping can only be done here on a doctor’s prescription, or by approving the personal importation of overseas products. Both processes are intended to be discouragingly lengthy, cumbersome, and expensive (and, in the case of prescription, personally humiliating), and so deter vapers from using the product: instead, some return to far deadlier smoking; to nicotine patches and gums that profit pharmaceutical companies, but many smokers reject; or get their vaping fix from a burgeoning black market.

The public health industry’s policy fanaticism is one thing: ad hominem attacks on pro-vaping advocates is another. The latest indirect attack on those advocates came last week in The Australian revealing their citing scientific research funded by the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, capitalised by tobacco industry giant Philip Morris but established independently of it.

The strategic wisdom of Philip Morris establishing the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World is debatable: it should have anticipated the attacks on its motives for doing so, and the determined campaigns by the public health establishment and its followers to discredit any research and researchers funded by the Foundation. It is an own goal, as The Australian’s coverage highlights.

But this strategic misjudgment doesn’t mean research conducted with the Foundation’s financial support is biased, tainted, or a tobacco company front. When reputable researchers believe vaping does have a positive role to play in ending the global scourge of smoking, where can they go when the public health industry denounces them as heretics, and effectively shuts down their access to government and philanthropic research grants?

Surely, if scientific research is published, valid, peer-reviewed, and defensible, it doesn’t matter who funds it as long as researchers declare any conflicts of interest… That applies to research funded by this foundation, just as much as it applies to research funded by, say, the National Health and Medical Research Council.

And if a funder sponsors research that doesn’t fit their hoped-for outcomes and, indeed, could benefit the cases of its opponents, is it any less valid for that? Apparently so, according to the public health industry.

If that industry truly is serious about its mantra, ‘there’s not enough hard evidence to say vaping is less harmful than smoking’, it should let a thousand flowers bloom to gather that evidence quickly, and be prepared to accept that not all research findings will conform with its rigid world view. A forlorn hope, unfortunately.

The prevalence of vaping in Australia is steadily rising despite everything being done, Canute-like, to stop it. Minors are, as the public health industry says, being attracted to it by its novelty and, dare it be said, the dark glamour of surreptitiously obtaining disapproved substances. This is genuine cause for community concern.

Instead of creating and expanding the nicotine vaping black market, however, surely it is better to make it open, transparent, and legal. Control the beast.

Make vaping a legitimate, over-the-counter, adult, alternative to smoking, just as nicotine gums and patches are.

Consequently, legalise nicotine for vaping in federal poisons regulation, just as that legislation currently allows nicotine in ‘tobacco prepared and packed for smoking’ (and hypocritically so, given deadly cigarettes remain lawful retail products while the public health industry wages its almost unhinged jihad on vaping).

Impose regulatory controls over the quality of vaping solutions and devices, and the quantity of substances – not just nicotine – in solutions.

Draw on the experiences of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and other comparable countries. Bring into Australia vaping policies and regulations that work there, and screen out what doesn’t.

Permit access to public and philanthropic research funding to scientists and researchers on all sides of the vaping versus smoking issue.

But above all, end the North Korean-style closing of the public health industry mind to anything that disrupts their worldview, and especially end its denouncing of anyone who contradicts or questions its received wisdom.

As matters stand, the public health industry’s implacable refusal to keep an open mind risks killing smokers – driven back to the deadly weed from harm-reducing alternatives – with their unhealthy version of kindness.

Terry Barnes has, in the past, advised vaping advocates and industry entities on related policy and regulatory issues