While ego electronic cigarette vary from brand to brand-priceangels.com

Their main pitch: The battery-powered devices, which deliver nicotine, flavor, and other chemicals in the form of a vapor, are essentially harmless, especially compared with the cancer-causing toxins in regular cigarette smoke, and therefore should get friendlier treatment.E-cigarette makers large and small also have been lobbying across the country as cities and state legislatures debate how steeply to tax ego electronic cigarette and where people should be allowed to use them.

The giants of the tobacco industry know what it’s like to face heavy government regulation. So as the makers of Marlboro, Newport and Camel enter the booming market for electronic cigarettes, they are pressing to keep their new products free of such strict oversight.With the consumption of e-cigarettes projected by some analysts to surpass that of traditional cigarettes within the next decade, exactly how e-cigarettes are defined — and what kinds of regulations and taxes they will face — are critical to the industry’s future.
Late last month, attorneys general from nearly 40 states wrote to the FDA, urging the agency to treat e-cigarettes like traditional cigarettes and impose restrictions on marketing them to young people. Around the same time, top Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to Margaret Hamburg, head of the FDA, asking that the agency move quickly to regulate electronic cigarettes. The letter cited a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said e-cigarette use among middle and high school students has been rising rapidly.gfD2Ssd2

The lawmakers also asked the Republican chairman of the committee to schedule a hearing on the health effects of e cigarette oil and other tobacco products.Since September 2012, the FDA’s tobacco center has held at least a dozen ­meetings with representatives of the ­e-cigarette industry, according to agency records and multiple participants. These “listening sessions” have been held at the companies’ request, the FDA said, and those who have participated describe them as a “one-way conversation,” with agency officials providing few clues to their thinking about e-cigarettes.

While e-cigarettes vary from brand to brand, they generally look like cigarettes but do not burn tobacco. Instead, when a user pulls air from the end, an atomizer converts liquid inside the device into a vapor. A starter kit, which typically includes two e-cigarette, extra batteries and various nicotine cartridges, can cost anywhere from $20 to $200.

Regulators say too little research exists to understand how much nicotine or other potentially harmful chemicals are inhaled during e-cigarette use, or whether they might act as a stepping stone to getting children and nonsmokers hooked on conventional cigarettes.After the FDA formally declares that e-cigarette fall under its regulatory umbrella — a decision that, before the government shutdown, had been expected this month — the agency eventually could make an array of other moves. ­E-cigarettes could in time face restrictions on how they are marketed, where they are sold and who can buy them.

The firm, Shockey Scofield Solutions, also lobbies on behalf of V2, an e-cigarette maker owned by National Tobacco that paid $60,000 over the first six months of the year for the firm’s services.Lorillard Tobacco — best known for its Newport cigarettes — entered the e-cigarette market in 2012 with its purchase of blu eCigs and has started to lend some of its lobbying might to the cause.

“We always have an e-cigarette on hand so they can see it,” said Michael Shannon, vice president of external affairs at Lorillard.While Lorillard, NJOY and other ­e-cigarette makers say they welcome FDA regulation, Shannon said, “We just want to make sure that regulation is appropriate and recognizes the differences between e-cigarette and traditional cigarettes.”

In the traditional cigarette business, new products must be approved by federal officials, television ads aren’t permitted and packages must carry warning labels about the health risks of tobacco.E-cigarettes have only become widely available in recent years, but their rapid growth contrasts sharply with the steadily declining sales of traditional cigarettes.

The question of how to regulate ­e-cigarettes has lingered for years. In 2010, a federal judgesided with manufacturers who had challenged the FDA’s authority to regulate electronic cigarette oil as a drug delivery device, which could have meant a strict set of regulations.

Ray Story, the e-cigarette company owner who prompted the lawsuit, now heads the Tobacco Vapor e-cigarette Association. He is trying to convince regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to adopt a uniform set of what he calls “common-sense regulations,” such as safe manufacturing standards, tight restrictions on sales to minors and limits on marketing, steps that many industry executives also say they support.