NY Senate debating public ban on e-cigarettes

State lawmakers are considering whether to include electronic cigarettes in the state's indoor public smoking ban. The Senate Health Committee panel heard testimony Monday from health experts who said that the nicotine liquid and the vapor e-cigarettes produce could be hazardous to both consumers and the public.

The state's Clean Indoor Air Act prohibits smoking traditional cigarettes in nearly all workplaces in the state. Proponents of the ban hope that e-cigarettes will also be included, as they are in New York City as of late last month. Research hasn't yet produced a definitive answer on whether secondhand vapor is a threat to the public, but health experts believe that e-cigarette companies are marketing to teenagers and young adults with flavors like cherry, chocolate and gummy bear.

"Federal law recognizes that the purpose of these flavorings is to addict children to nicotine and create a new generation of tobacco users," said Dr. Harlan Juster, director of the health department's bureau of tobacco control.

Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat, said he has seen e-cigarettes with the image of Hello Kitty, a cartoon cat. According to the state health department, only 12 percent of high school-age kids reported having smoked a cigarette within 30 days in a 2012 survey, down from 27 percent in 2000. The health department says 88 percent of adult smokers began before the age of 18.

E-cigarettes are marketed as safer than regular cigarettes and a transitional measure to bypass quitting cold turkey, but still contain nicotine, the addictive ingredient in traditional cigarettes. Medical and public health professionals have seen no evidence that e-cigarettes help smokers quit, according to Lawrence Eisenstein, president of the state Association of County Health Officials.

Lawmakers also heard from opponents who said the ban would infringe on the rights of business owners. "The Association sees this as another attempt by government to dictate how New Yorkers run their business," said Scott Wexler, executive director of the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association.

Opponents suggest waiting for the Food and Drug administration's review of e-cigarettes before any legislation banning indoor smoking of e-cigarettes is enacted.

Source: Poststar

Will E-Cigarettes Save Big Tobacco?

Back in April, I asked if E-Cigarettes would relight Big Tobacco’s prospects.  I had my doubts.

E-cigs seemed to be a more pleasurable version of a nicotine patch: something that an existing smoker might switch to for health reasons but not exactly an attractive or glamorous product for someone who doesn’t already smoke.  (Humphrey Bogart would not have been as cool in Casablanca with an e-cig dangling between his lips.  This is an indisputable fact, not an opinion.) It certainly made sense for Altria, Reynolds American RAI -3.43% and the rest of Big Tobacco to get in on the action; it’s better to extract a little more revenue from defecting cigarette smokers than to lose them altogether.

But investors should be realistic about the potential for e-cigs to make Big Tobacco a growth industry again.  It’s not going to happen. Though there are hundreds of millions of tobacco users worldwide (the World Health Organization puts the number of tobacco users at over 1 billion), public health campaigns, legal restrictions, and changing consumer tastes have put cigarette smoking in terminal decline in the developed world.  As a sobering (no pun intended) case in point, American teenagers are more likely to use illegal drugs than to light up a cigarette.

Perhaps most damaging, new “plain packaging” rules are directly assaulting the single most valuable assets of Big Tobacco companies: their brands.
In Australia, all cigarette boxes look identical, regardless of brand: plain white boxes with the brand name written in a uniform font, size and placement.  Oh, and the same graphic photos of people dying of lung cancer on the back.
 Similar rules are being considered in Canada, India, the UK and the European Union.  Big Tobacco is fighting it tooth and nail on trademark and intellectual property grounds, and I consider their objections valid.  But the assault on branding seems to be the next front in the ongoing war of attrition between public health advocates and Big Tobacco, and if history is any guide, the public health advocates will win.

This brings me back to e-cigarettes. Altria is jumping into the e-cig market with a new product under the brand name Mark Ten.  Nowhere on the packaging will there be any prominent mention of Altria or its best-known brand, Marlboro.
 I’m left scratching my head here.  There are over 250 e-cigarette brands currently on the market.  While I don’t see a smoker paying a large premium for a Marlboro-branded e-cig, I would certainly expect them to gravitate to a brand they already know. In failing to use the Marlboro name, Altria seems to be neutralizing its single biggest strength: a consumer brand that is behind only Coca-Cola KO -1.27% and Anheuser-Busch InBev ’s  Budweiser in name recognition.

This would be tantamount to calling Diet Coke “Healthy Pop” and leaving all mention of the Coke brand off the can.  It’s madness.
 If Big Tobacco is wanting to start fresh with new branding because of the toxic association between the existing brands and those filthy, old traditional cigarettes, they are wide off the mark.  Their market is existing smokers, not nonsmokers.  Unless they brand e-cigs as “portable flavored hookahs” or something with novelty appeal, it’s hard to imagine this product appealing to a young, unbiased consumer.

 This brings me to a related topic.  I noted last month that marijuana stocks were a terrible investment.  The companies engaged in legal production and marketing are small, poorly capitalized, and not likely to still be in business five years from now. But as the legal regime surrounding their product continues to be relaxed, there may be room for a large, well-capitalized company to sweep in and take over the market.  Big Tobacco’s massive production and distribution machine could be easily tweaked for the new product—which could be branded under familiar brand names such as Marlboro or Camel.

A lot of Americans would be put off by this, of course.  Fully 49% of Americans are against marijuana legalization for very valid reasons.  But the question Big Tobacco needs to ask is this: can their reputation get any worse than it already is?

Big Tobacco is already a pariah industry under constant attack.  What would they have to lose by marketing marijuana cigarettes in Colorado and Washington?  It’s hard to see a loyal cigarette smoker kicking the habit because of additional bad publicity.

At any rate, if Big Tobacco is going to continue to be a good investment for its shareholders, management needs to focus on leveraging their core brands.  The alternative is to slowly fade away.

Article source: Forbes

Should E-cigarettes Be Banned in Washington?

Two memebers of Washington DC council suggest to ban electronic cigarettes saying they may be dangerous for non-smokers. E-cigarettes became very popular today because they are used to help quit smoking tobacco. Smoker may choose among a number of flavors and here tobacco is not used at all. E-cigarettes are equipped with battery-operated inhalers which heat nicotine into vapor which has same effects as tobacco cigarettes do.

E-cigarettes produce no smoke and namely this characteristics helped them avoid state regulations.

In Washington it is a normal thing to see citizens smoking e-cigarettes in such public places as bars and restaurants. However, city councils  Yvette M. Alexander and David Grosso suggest to prohibit that. They want all kinds of cigarettes to be banned in public places. Nowadays, in Washington functionates a law that prohibits smoking in public places.

Alexander says smoking e-cigarettes is similar to smoking tobacco and the difference is that we do not know negative effects of e-cigarettes and therefore we cannot put on risk non-smokers.

Today in the USA many states want to ban e-cigarettes. In 2011 the FDA said it would regulate e-cigarettes as it does tobacco. Specialists say that studies of e-cigarettes effects are needed in order to know if they are dangerous for people who inhale their vapors.

In turn, manufacturers of electronic cigarettes claim that their products have no negative effects on smokers because they do not contain chemicals that tobacco cigarettes have. Big Cigs, the producer of e-cigarettes in the USA, says that with such statements tobacco industry wants to undervalue e-cigs industry.

Alexander says that e-cigarettes do not help stop smoking as they contain nicotine and besides this atrract more people.