Are Cigarettes Cigarettes If They’re Electronic?

E-cigarettes, those small vaporizers that deliver nicotine to the lungs without fire and smoke, are the apparent future of tobacco, and the FDA is about to respond to the industry with a pack of regulations.

The states, which make as much as $4.35 per pack (New York), may be close behind.

But is it fair to treat odorless, smokeless cigarettes like their deadly, super-addictive Victorian era progenitors?

It’s probably too soon to say. As The Verge points out, researchers are still debating the health effects of vaporized nicotine.

It used to be a fringe market, but now Big Tobacco and the government have noticed that e-cigarettes are, in the words of a Wells Fargo report, “more than just a fad.”

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer