A top-selling ego cigarette brand-Priceangels.com

The Food and Drug Administration said last month that menthol-flavored cigarettes likely pose more public health risk than regular cigarettes, a potential precursor to tighter restrictions on minty smokes. The federal agency also plans to propose regulations for battery-powered ego cigarette that turn nicotine-laced liquid into a vapor.That makes things tricky for Lorillard, which brings in about 90% of sales from its Newport menthol cigarettes and which paid $135 million last year to acquire blu, a top-selling e-cigarette brand.

In addition to making an early bet on e-cigarettes, Murray Kessler, the chairman and chief executive of Lorillard, expanded distribution of menthol cigarettes west of the Mississippi, helping the nation's third-largest tobacco manufacturer by sales outgrow rivals.We want to capture the behavior smokers like so they can make a viable switch. With an electronic cigarette, you have the potential for massive harm reduction.Right now e-cigarettes can be advertised on TV, unlike regular cigarettes. What do you say to critics who say that's glorifying smoking again, or normalizing it?

Mr. Kessler: I'm de-normalizing smoking, I'm normalizing vaping. I'm making it so five people are sitting around eating dinner and vaping, and someone smokes and they're like, "You're kidding, you still do that?" I realize the cigarette market is 100 times bigger at this point but that's the vision.E-cigarettes by rivals like NJOY look like a regular cigarette and have the same color. Your e-cigarettes are typically black and look more like a pen than a cigarette. Why are you going in the other direction?bg5Fdmf

Mr. Kessler: When you're vaping on a product that looks like a traditional cigarette at a bar, you're still putting that cigarette smoker into a confrontation because at first glance a waiter or bartender is going to come up and say, "Put that out." And then you're going to have to explain it's an electronic cigarette and it's uncomfortable. We make a white and a black [e-cigarette]. When we put them side by side in a store, the black outsells the white eight to one.

E-cigarettes is officially a $1 billion per year business.This is according to Wells Fargo data cited by V2 Cigarettes, a major online electronic cigarette retailer.Conservative data indicates that traditional electronic cigarette retail sales on an annualized basis is $700M,” said Bonnie Herzog, Managing Director and Senior Beverage and Tobacco Analyst at Wells Fargo Securities. “When combined with online sales, the industry has now exceeded $1 billion for the first-time ever, with the consumption of EGO CE4 likely surpassing that of traditional cigarettes in the next decade.

Shopshire's story resonates with electronic cigarette users everywhere. A car in the Valley was badly damaged after it caught fire because of an e-cigarette left in the charger, fire officials said. Another car was damaged in Salt Lake City for the same reason in July.Right now, e-cigarettes fall into a regulatory gray area, with the Federal Drug Administration having no authority over the devices. CBS 5 News could find no mention of e-cigarettes on the Consumer Protection Safety Commission's website.

CBS 5 News contacted the company that distributes Smokein T cigarettes late Tuesday with no response. Shopshire said the company has offered to replace his, but he doesn't want a new one."I think I'm done smoking, in general, because the regular cigarette can kill me via cancer and this can kill me and my family by a fire," he said.Electronic cigarettes – e-cigarettes as they are called – came on the market a few years ago as an aid to stop smoking. They were sold almost exclusively online and at mall kiosks.