SACRAMENTO — After months of inaction, the state Assembly on Thursday approved a package of sweeping tobacco-control bills that would regulate the manufacture and sale of electronic cigarettes and make California the nation’s second state to increase the legal smoking age from 18 to 21.

Lawmakers also approved bills that would allow counties to enact local cigarette taxes, close loopholes in existing smoke-free workplace laws and require that all K-12 schools be tobacco-free.

The legislative package first cleared the state Senate last summer. But in the hectic final few days of last year’s session — amid intense pressure from tobacco companies — the bills stalled in the lower house and languished there until this week.

“Big Tobacco’s assault on youth and taxpayers was dealt a major setback today when the Legislature came to the rescue of Californians,” said Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who authored the e-cigarette bill. “Tobacco-free habits save lives and billions of taxpayer health care dollars.”

After a vote next week in the Senate on minor amendments, the legislation will head to Gov. Jerry Brown, who is expected to sign the bills into law.

A coalition of doctors and other anti-tobacco advocates who struggled in recent years to break Big Tobacco’s grip on the Capitol — and are working to get a $2-per-pack cigarette tax on November’s ballot that the industry is expected to spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat — cheered Thursday’s votes.

Proponents of California’s landmark right-to-die law are also thankful because action on the tobacco legislation will allow the Legislature to finally shut down a special session on health care issues as soon as next week. The session started last summer.

The law allowing terminally ill Californians to take their own lives with help from a doctor cannot take effect until 90 days after the special session ends, even though Brown signed the legislation last fall.

“My hope and prayer is that I can access the law,” said 62-year-old San Jose resident Corinne Johns-Treat, whose lung cancer recently metastasized to her brain. “It would bring me great comfort to know that I will have the option to pass peacefully.”

Supporters of the tobacco legislation said that upping the smoking age to 21 — as Santa Clara County and Hawaii have already done — will discourage the use of cigarettes among youths and over time will reduce deaths.

An amendment to the bill approved Thursday exempted active-duty members of the military.

While California already limits sales of e-cigarettes to adults, a report released last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that e-cigarette use among middle and high school students tripled from 4.5 percent in 2013 to 13.4 percent in 2014. That makes them the most popular nicotine product among teens, who can choose from hundreds of flavors, including “gummy bear.”

Regulating their manufacture and sale as tobacco products should help reverse this trend, supporters of the e-cig bill said.

“Adolescent brains are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of nicotine and nicotine addiction,” said Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg.

E-cigarettes mimic smoking by heating a nicotine-infused liquid to produce a vapor that users can inhale.

Eight other states — Colorado, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming — already treat e-cigarettes as tobacco products.

Most Republican lawmakers voted against all six of the tobacco bills the Assembly passed Thursday. They railed against the idea of separating the legal smoking age from other rights of adulthood such as voting and serving on juries as an absurd infringement on Californians’ rights.

“Is this a state that believes in the idea of individual liberty, in the freedom of choice and that you can buy the products that you want even though they might harm you?” asked Assembly Republican leader Chad Mayes, R-Yucca Valley. “I submit to you that we have moved beyond our basic ideals.”

The Assembly approved the smoking-age bill on a 46-26 vote, with six Democrats voting no or abstaining and two GOP lawmakers, including the Bay Area’s lone Republican in the Legislature, Catharine Baker of Dublin, voting yes.

The tobacco industry lobbied heavily against the bills.

A spokesman for Reynolds American said the company had no comment on Thursday’s votes. David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria, said states and localities should leave minimum age standards to Congress and the Food and Drug Administration.

Young Bay Area residents had mixed reactions to the legislation.

“I’ve been smoking ever since my mom put my first cigarette into my hands at age 13,” said Juan Parada, a hip hop musician taking a smoking break Thursday in downtown San Jose. Now, at 21, he declares, “I know that each time I take a puff, I am killing myself slowly.”

Yet Parada, who performs under the moniker “Young Manny,” said increasing the smoking age to 21 will have little effect.

“Kids will find a way to get what they want — like getting an older person to buy cigarettes for them,” he said. “That’s what I did. That’s what lots of young kids do, and it’s just not that difficult.”

But Dylan Baker, who started smoking at 16, likes the idea of boosting the legal age. He said if he had been legally forced to wait longer, he might have made a different decision about taking up the pack-and-a-half-a-day habit he regrets — but can’t kick.

The regulation of e-cigarettes also sounded good to the 23-year-old San Jose jeweler and music producer.

“I hate to say it,” Baker said, “but they should be regulating everything people take into their bodies.”

Contact Jessica Calefati at 916-441-2101. Follow her at Twitter.com/Calefati.