CA: Bill introduced to legally equate e-cigs to cigarettes.

[pnwmom]

188. I think the corporations who want to sell nicotine delivery systems

that produce an off-gas need to meet all the usual FDA, EPA, and OSHA standards. If they want to slip in via the back door of a tobacco exception, then they need to accept the limitations that other tobacco products are subject to.

The different manufacturers are all using their own ingredients and processes, which are not subject to FDA oversight or even full disclosure because of the tobacco exception. Do you seriously expect the FDA to have to conduct separate research on each and every e-cig product to prove whether they're safe? That should be up to the manufacturers -- and would be, if they hadn't succeeded in getting the tobacco exception.

Why should I have to sit on a plane with 1/3 of the passengers smoking these things? Or sit at a desk surrounded by chain smokers. That's what the norm used to be. Either the e-cig manufacturers need to drop their insistence that e-cigs are a tobacco product and subject themselves to FDA regulation, OR they need to accept the fact that tobacco products are restricted in public settings.

http://journal.publications.chestnet.org/article.aspx?articleid=1187104

Electronic Cigarettes:
No Such Thing as a Free Lunch…or Puff
Mark V. Avdalovic, MD; Susan Murin, MD, FCCP

As practitioners of pulmonary and cardiac medicine, many of us have no doubt been asked by our patients who smoke about so-called “electronic cigarettes” (e-cigarettes). These devices, termed electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) by the World Health Organization, have been available in the US market since 2007. Our patients have likely heard far more about these devices through marketing, chat rooms, and word of mouth, than we as physicians have through the medical literature. Because ENDS are not currently regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as medical devices— recent court decisions, denied the agency the right to such oversight—manufacturers of ENDS have not been required to establish either safety or efficacy, and we have had few data with which to answer our patients’ queries about these products. Are e-cigarettes a smoking cessation tool? Are they a harmless alternative to cigarettes, as manufacturers claim?