Nicotine vaporizers, or “e-cigarettes,” have touted two major benefits in their short lifetime: One, they’re allegedly “safer” than regular tobacco products, both for the smoker and anyone nearby. Two, they claim offer a path to better health by weaning users off of the more harmful tobacco cigarettes. According to a study out of UCSF, neither of those things may be true, and researchers recommend that for now, e-cigarettes be regulated the same as tobacco products.

“You can be a lot less bad as a cigarette and still be pretty bad,” said Stanton Glantz, director of UCSF’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and a co-author of the Circulation paper.

That more or less sums up the researchers findings. Because the vaporizer industry is so young, there still hasn’t been sufficient time to conduct a proper longitudinal study on the health effects of nicotine vapor. Still, they know it’s not just “harmless water vapor” that’s released when users puff on the devices, as the manufacturers claim. Perhaps most distressing, they found that when simulating a smoky indoor environment, markers for nicotine exposure were similar in nonsmokers exposed to both e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes

The study, which analyzed 84 research studies on e-cigarettes and other related scientific materials, also failed to find any connection between the growth in e-cigarette use and a decrease in traditional tobacco use. What users are instead doing is engaging in dual use, likely taking advantage of lax e-cigarette laws when possible (indoors, for instance), and reverting to traditional tobacco when forced outside.

If e-cigarettes are having any effect on tobacco use, it’s in teenagers: While most of them are dual users themselves, up to a third of them have never smoked a traditional cigarette. Even still, e-cigarettes are yet another avenue for nicotine addiction at a young age, and researchers note that the devices are often heavily marketed towards teenagers.

The researchers conclude that until better, more in-depth studies can be conducted, e-cigarettes and vaporizers should be regulated precisely the same way as tobacco cigarettes. Evidence showing that e-cigarette use aided in the cessation of traditional tobacco products could ostensibly improve overall public health, but for now, it just isn’t there.

“As we’re getting better and better understanding of the chemistry of these things, they’re looking worse and worse,” said Glantz.