Banned in Iceland?

[shogun]

Customs stopped my order from Njoy and the custom officer told me he thinks e-cigarettes are banned in Iceland! I will get a full report after the weekend. Has anyone else had this problem? I think it is very strange to ban e-cigs but allow regular tobacco and nicotine quitting products!

Shogn

[TropicalBob]

It's not strange when you have history on your side. Many things that would be illegal today are "grandfathered" into legality. That includes cigarettes. Do you think any government would approve cigarettes if an inventor submitted them today for approval? The e-products, however, are nicotine delivery devices. New. I expect mixed reactions by governments on whether to allow their sale. They are not clearly legal; nor clearly illegal. Each government will decide as it confronts them.

Virtually all legal quit-smoking items in the United States, where I live, are products of Big Pharmaceutical. Millions have been spent on development and testing. Billions stand to be made. E-smoking has had none of those tests, no approval.

[RatInDaHat]

That's where the good doctor comes in.

[TropicalBob]

Empirical evidence won't hold up.

If a government agency decides these are "nicotine delivery devices," the government will regulate them as medical products, requiring the same years of study and expenditure of millions of dollars that it took to get patches, gum, lozenges and inhalers on the market.

E-smoking won't happen if that's the way the flipped coin lands.

Health is not the concern. We all keep arguing they're safer. But there are no studies to prove they're safer than FDA-approved NRT products. In fact, there are no long-term studies proving they're safe at all. We certainly hope so, but hope isn't proof. No one has ever inhaled propylene glycol vapors multiple times each day for years. That's what we're doing, assuming it's safer than inhaling cigarette smoke. While that probably is true, absolute knowledge of safety will be elusive for some time to come. The governments of many countries might ere on the side of "don't sell it before its safety is proven."

If that happens, we're looking at these products being banned.

[jamie]

Shogun, I think you added the tags here? I saw banned in the tag cloud, however I chose to use bans instead because:
- we have threads on past, current, and future potential smoking/tobacco/ecig bans
- the tag banned sounded like a forum user had been banned.