2009: Suffolk County, NY passes first legislation banning indoor use of electronic cigarette in areas where smoking is also prohibited and bans sales to minors.
Because they contain no tobacco, e-cigarettes aren't subject to U.S. tobacco laws, which means they can be purchased without proof of age, especially online. This raises concerns that e-cigs may be particularly appealing to kids and may encourage nicotine addiction among young people. And while manufacturers of the e-cigarette claim that it's the cigarette you can "smoke" anywhere, regulatory agencies around the world are taking a close look at these gadgets and instituting a range of restrictions on their use.
I can has tapatalked this.
The question of how much nicotine is delivered to users of e-cigarettes is one that you might have thought had been solved years ago. Yet the reality is that there’s never really been much consensus on this issue. In fact, the question of how much nicotine cigarettes deliver to their users is one that researchers still argue over.
The reason for all this uncertainty is one of methodology. Regarding cigarettes, it was assumed that if you set up a machine to mimic smokers (the ISO methodology), and analyze the smoke that the machine ‘smokes’, you’d have a pretty good approximation of how much nicotine real smokers were absorbing. Sadly, the machines did a poor job of mimicking smokers and probably hugely underestimated the real numbers.
A similar story occurred with e-cigarettes, when Eissenberg and colleagues found that little nicotine is absorbed by vapers. Except that they didn’t use vapers in the study, they used smokers, and they did a puff-for-puff comparison with cigarettes. As any vaper worth his or her salt knows, you don’t vape like you smoke – so the study came back with results that are irrelevant to real-world use (although that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing).