Electronic cigarettes catch on with consumers

John Wisniewski wonders whether electronic cigarettes will help him stop his 32-year smoking habit.

He’s held off spending $99 for an electronic cigarette kit that he tried at the New Smoke Shop kiosk at Oakland Mall in Troy. “To be honest, I want to do my own research,” said Wisniewski, 44, of Holly.

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are devices that look like a wooden cigarette that contain nicotine or flavorings transformed by a tiny battery into an odorless vapor. They are sold mostly over the Internet, as well as at some malls, including New Smoke Shop at Oakland Mall and Port Huron’s Birchwood Mall.

Users say e-cigarettes curb tobacco smoking, though there’s no proof they do, and the industry’s leading trade group has set rules for its members saying the products should not be sold as smoking-cessation tools.

The other appeal of e-cigarettes is that they are odorless, letting smokers get around tobacco bans in workplaces, restaurants, malls and some bars.

Those benefits apparently are enough to keep consumer interest high in e-cigarettes, despite warnings in July by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which said they contained some cancer-causing materials.

The products are banned or restricted for sale and promotion in many countries.

The FDA warning initially dampened business but “we’ve started to pick up the pace,” said Travis Walker, who runs an Internet-based business, Vaporstix.com, from his Flint-area home. Other Michigan vendors report similar upticks.

Walker said he fills about 500 orders a month, from a $49.95 starter kit to cappuccino, apple and strawberry flavorings added to the product for minty, fruity, coffee and other tastes, for $9.95 each.

Nationwide, sales remain strong, a $100-million-a-year industry in the United States alone, said Matt Salmon, executive director of the Electronic Cigarette Association, an organization representing 20 larger companies.

“The ideal user for this is someone who is a committed, longtime smoker,” Salmon said. “Their spouse doesn’t want them in the house because they smell. There’s no acrid odor or secondhand smoke with this. It doesn’t leave a smell on your carpet, clothes or draperies.”

Warning letters saying the devices shouldn’t be used by pregnant women or people with high blood pressure are included with the devices.

The FDA has stopped about 50 shipments of e-cigarette products at the border, but now faces a lawsuit from two U.S. companies that sell the products. For now, “there is no import alert on e-cigarettes at the border,” FDA spokeswoman Siobhan DeLancey told the Free Press.

“Until the case is decided, we are trying to alert consumers that these products have not been evaluated for safety or effectiveness and we do not know what the long-term effects of using them may be.”

Wisniewski, who has tried to stop smoking several times, wonders whether the electronic cigarettes might help him stop smoking. His downfall is that no cessation product he has tried totally replaces the satisfaction he gets from holding onto a cigarette, drawing on it from the corner of his mouth and seeing the cloud of smoke, he said.

The electronic cigarette came close to delivering what Wisniewski craves from tobacco, he said.

Still, he knows he should quit smoking tobacco. “I can’t keep going on like this and inhaling all these carcinogens,” he said.

BY PATRICIA ANSTETT
FREE PRESS MEDICAL WRITER

Be Sociable, Share!

•