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• telegraph.co.uk - NY bill would ban ‘e-cigarettes’ until FDA action

NY bill would ban ‘e-cigarettes’ until FDA action

I simply don’t understand this story, why on Earth would you ban something that is so much less harmless than the legal option? Electronic cigarettes are like a million times less harmful than the normal cigarettes. The only thing that makes sense here is that the tobacco industry flat out owns the government…why else would they even be considering this law? Sad.

Associated Press

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a bill that would make the state the first to ban electronic cigarettes, devices touted on the Internet in ads promising all the pleasures of smoking without the deadly health threat.

Health officials say e-cigarettes are just another addictive habit, one that can hook kids early and legally on smoking. But advocates who have used the devices to quit or cut down smoking tobacco call the battery-operated smokes a miracle.

“E-cigarettes are for some people a tool for enabling them to continue their nicotine addictions when they are someplace where they can’t smoke,” said Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried, whose panel passed the bill Tuesday. “I don’t think that’s good for public health.”

The Manhattan Democrat said the manufacturers should prove to the federal Food and Drug Administration that e-cigarettes are an effective smoking cessation aid in order to sell them to adults.

Advocates — who say there is a nationwide grass-roots movement to keep electronic cigarettes available — say the proof is in their health.

“I find it difficult to believe that my wheezing and productive morning cough would have magically disappeared sometime between March 2009 and now if I had continued smoking, waiting for someone to proclaim e-cigarettes 100 percent safe,” said Elaine Keller of Springfield, Va. She is vice president of the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-Free Alternatives Association.

“Why do politicians and organizations that claim to be protecting public health want to take away options that could save smokers’ lives?” she said Tuesday.

The bill’s sponsor was moved to act by the flood of Internet ads for the products and sales at shopping malls.

“So I did some study,” said Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat and 20-year smoker who quit much more than a dozen years ago. “I discovered what's within the e-cigarettes is really a mystery.”

She wants to ban them in New York until they're much more thoroughly investigated and regulated.

Her bill was approved within the Assembly last year but stalled within the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. Senate Well being Committee Chairman Kemp Hannon, a Republican, said the bill likely will probably be regarded as by his committee along with a hearing might be held, but it’s too early to predict what will occur with the proposal.

E-cigarettes have prompted debate nationwide since they became widely accessible within the United States in 2006. But as either a tobacco cigarette substitute or a a lot much more extensively tested and restricted drug-delivery device, the future of e-cigarettes will likely be decided by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA lost a court case last year after attempting to treat e-cigarettes as drug-delivery devices, instead of tobacco items, simply because e-cigarettes heat nicotine extracted from tobacco.

“Maybe it stops some from smoking, but maybe it assists some kid begin,” said Russ Sciandra, director of the Center for a Tobacco Totally free New York.

Powerful lobbies are involved. If treated as a tobacco product, e-cigarettes would steer clear of the study and trials needed of competitors within the pharmaceutical business, such as anti-smoking patches and inhalers. As a medical device, e-cigarettes could draw opposition from that powerful lobby as a fresh and much less costly competitor.

The supporters of e-cigarettes are now watching New York “very closely. They type of snuck up on us,” said Keller.

She said she has been tobacco totally free since March 2009 after 45 years of smoking. She said her group amounts to a grass-roots effort of those that really feel the government has blocked this “miracle” product.

“There is no business support on this thing at all,” Keller said of the organization. “We wish to maintain it this way so no 1 can say we are a shill for the tobacco, drug or e-cigarette business.”

She also tries to recast the safety question.

“I can’t point to anything to say it’s 100 percent secure,” Keller said. “The thing is, it only requirements to be safer. The only standard is that it’s safer than smoking.”