US FDA to draft rules on e-cigarette regulation, threaten $1.5B industry

Industry observers said that the US Food and Drug Administration is expected to submit a proposal for the regulation of e-cigarettes as medical devices, a Businessweek report read. The move to regulate the tobacco alternative will be threatening the $1.5 billion industry once the FDA finishes their draft of rules to govern e-cigarettes.

E-cigarettes, which are cartridges filled with a nicotine solution and a battery-powered coil to heat the solution into vapor, has been getting attention lately not only because they present a cheaper, arguably healthier alternative to the tobacco kind, but because the product has yet to be regulated. Until now.

Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids president Matt Myers believed that e-cigarettes are merely the same thing as the tobacco ones, except that they're packaged in flavors, cheaper in terms of daily consumption and do not come with general surgeon warnings. He said, "If e-cigarettes were regulated so that they became a way to get people off cigarettes, we would lead the cheer. But the issues are complicated. E-cigarettes are not harmless. You want to discourage people who do not currently use e-cigarettes from taking up the habit. Our concern is that it will re-glamorize smoking and lead people to switch to cigarettes, or experiment with cigarettes."

Businessweek said that the popularity of the e-cigarette is like a two-edge blade. Despite champions of the product saying that the use of e-cigarettes reduce the number of current smokers and exposure to health risks associated with smoking tobacco, it also presents an allure to former smokers and teenagers, who might return or adopt the habit of smoking simply because they deem it as a lesser form of evil when compared to tobacco.

University of California at Los Angeles professor of public policy Mark Kleiman said, "Given the certain gain from switching current smokers to e-cigs and the uncertain signs of the effects of adding new users, it seems to me that we should get public policy out of the way for now while watching to see how many of today's happy e-cig users become unhappy users three years from now."

Tags

US Food and Drug Administration, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, US Surgeon General

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