Misguided health police are cracking down on e-cigarettes.

E-cigarettes let people get a hit of nicotine without burning tobacco.

Avoiding burning tobacco is the single greatest preventative health measure human beings can take, given the diseases conventional cigarettes cause.

Unfortunately, our government and media now act as if vaping e-cigarettes is the health crisis.

"Your kids are not an experiment! Protect them from e-cigarettes," warns former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in a CDC PSA.

My former employer, ABC News, which never finds a risk it doesn't hype, has run more than a dozen scare stores on vaping. A Nightline reporter warned about kids "addicted to nicotine before they even graduate from middle school!"

Yet compared to regular cigarettes, e-cigarettes are "extraordinarily less harmful," says Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In my new newest video she says, "we should really be encouraging people to use vaping."

Calling vaping safer than smoking doesn't mean the risks are zero. Vapor contains harmful chemicals, too. But scientists say it's far less harmful than smoking. If smokers switched to e-cigarettes, that would save millions of lives.

Nicotine is what makes both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes addictive. But nicotine itself isn't that bad. Like caffeine, it's a stimulant.

"On the spectrum of drugs that you can become addicted to," says Minton, "nicotine and caffeine are very similar."

The big health risks come from the 7,000 other chemicals generated by burning tobacco leaves.

By contrast, e-cigarette smoke is mostly just flavored vapor, which is less likely to harm anyone.

It doesn't even smell as bad as cigarettes. "Somebody who's vaping a huge cloud of Vanilla Cherry Blast, or whatever they're vaping, is way more pleasant than standing next to somebody exhaling smoke from a combustible cigarette," observed Minton.