I’m not saying that there isn’t room in the community for more than a couple of viewpoints but just today I ran across a couple of “with friends like these who needs enemies” articles.

The first is a position paper put out by TVECA (the Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association). A non-profit American association of e-cigarette companies, it has expanded into Europe, and though there is no evidence of it on their website, they claim to represent over 80% of European stakeholders.

The paper posits that ” E-cigarettes cannot qualify under EU legislation as medicinal products and will de facto be banned” and then argues that the only logical move is to classify e-cigarettes as tobacco products.

One hardly knows where to begin.

1. There is no tobacco in an e-cigarette.

2. If they were classified as tobacco products any number of existing onerous regulations would apply to them.

3. If they were classified as tobacco products any future legislation aimed at cigarettes could easily encompass them.

The industry has worked hard at stressing the fundamental differences between cigarettes and e-cigarettes. TVECA is a group I was all too generous with on a previous post (I now apologize for associating them with ECITA and ECTA) and ironically, as that post discussed, the only Canadian member was a non-nicotine producer from Edmonton. I wonder how he feels about being classified as a tobacco product given that already he was so dismissive of nicotine.

They try to limit some of the damage in suggesting an amendment that allows for flavors (tobacco products are restricted in some areas from being attractively flavored) in e-cigarettes since the vapor requires flavoring even to taste like tobacco. Good luck with that.

Article number 2 comes with a statement from Eli Alelov, the CEO of Logic Technology “..the wide variety of fruit flavored e-cigarettes offered by other companies don’t appeal to people who smoke cigarettes, but instead appeal to young people who don’t smoke”.

Its bad enough that the “only kids like flavors” argument comes from anti-nicotine groups but it is pure idiocy coming from someone who I am sure has seen first hand the delight with which so many smokers have switched to the more varied flavor palette of e-cigarettes. I am sure he has fielded a number of calls from adult ex-smoking customers asking whether they will be adding flavors in the future.

I am getting so sick of the flavor argument which in essence is saying that because I am an adult I will only eat, drink, chew or smoke things that taste like shit.

If these e-cigarette representatives get their way we can look forward to e-cigarettes with the warning “there is no such thing as a safe tobacco product” and moving back to having the earlier crazy wide range of taste selection – all the way from tobacco to menthol.