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The cigarette-shaped electronic devices convert a liquid nicotine mixture into vapour, delivering a smoke-like hit of nicotine, without the actual smoke. In this back room, e-smokers can choose from a variety of “e-liquid” flavour cartridges — from banana cream and Earl Grey tea to an ersatz version of du Maurier cigarettes — and their preferred strength of nicotine. All without the dangerous cocktail of 4,000 chemicals, such as carbon monoxide and arsenic, found in real cigarettes.

“We’re very busy,” says the salesman manning the AMK Trading showroom, who adds the electronic device has helped him to kick his own heavy smoking habit for the past three months.

E-cigarettes have become an exploding industry, worth nearly $2-billion in the U.S. alone, a market that some analysts project will eventually surpass that of traditional cigarettes.

But here, Health Canada has not approved nicotine e-cigarettes, creating a regulatory grey zone, forcing manufacturers and sellers to either flout the law, or steer clear of the country altogether.

E-cigarettes with non-nicotine liquid — another popular variety — are legal. But “no electronic cigarettes with nicotine … have been authorized by Health Canada,” the agency, which regulates nicotine under the Food and Drugs Act, said in an emailed statement. “Currently, the importation, advertisement and sale of these products is illegal in Canada.”

Unhealthy cigarettes you can buy at the corner store; but to get a vastly safer nicotine product that has helped countless people finally quit smoking, you have to break the law with underground shops or online sellers. Ideally, everyone would simply quit nicotine, says Arthur Slutsky, a Toronto-based pulmonary physician and co-founder of a non-electronic cigarette replacement device Nico-Puff. But, he says, it makes no sense to block healthier alternatives to cigarettes — “the dirtiest delivery system for nicotine that we know of.”