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In some circles these days sucking down a ciggie is seen in just about the same light as filling a V8 with high octane and street racing past a preschool with an open bottle of rum in one arm and an crack-pipe toting hooker under the other.

Thankfully for those who value their respiratory tracts, extorting smokers for skid-mark coloured reminders of their own irrationality is turning people away from the deadly dependence in droves. A state of affairs respected economist Stephen Koukoulas termed, “a Great Depression for tobacco sales”.

In this environment the heated debate surrounding electronic cigarettes, or E-cigs, should come as no surprise.

They are hand-held vaporisers which use a heating element to convert e-juice into an inhalable cloud. The juice is usually a solution of propylene glycol, water and flavouring often laced with plant derived nicotine.

While nicotine replacement therapies (NRT) like Nicabate are listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, despite extensive evidence against their value next to quitting cold turkey, nicotine charged fuel for the digital durries is illegal and classed as a dangerous poison in Australia. You cannot legally purchase even the vaporiser units in WA, SA and QLD. (Thankfully, that's what the internet is for. It may not be available to sell retail in most Aussie states, but importing it via, say, Amazon, is another matter).

Theoretically electronic cigarettes could be a healthier option – cutting out the mixed bag of dangerous carcinogens released by every smoker’s pull on the coffin’s nail. Manufacturers and a community of enthusiasts extoll the values of vaping, with countless forum threads and sycophantic “studies” dedicated to success stories of people breaking cigarette addiction.

However E-cigarettes’ novel appearance and a range of flavours reminiscent of a Baccardi Breezer catalogue have seen concerns arise over attracting young people to nicotine addiction. The technology is so new regulation and scientific review has lagged behind their uptake, leaving their safety in doubt.

A bit of background

Since the first E-cigarette patent in 2003 the market for electronic cigarettes has boomed, with approximately 1.3 million users in the UK alone and an estimated global market value of $US2 billion and counting. As most unregulated cottage industries dominated by start-ups, concerns quickly emerged over the reliability of vaporiser technology.

Studies (see here and here for two of the many) investigating the vapour production of e-cigs and the chemical makeup of e-juice found significant variations are common across brands and products. The sucking power needed to use an e-cig unit even changes over a puffing session as the heating element becomes saturated.

Nicotine levels of e-juice examined by Britain’s MHRA were found to differ greatly from concentrations stated on labels and even from batch to batch of the same brand.

The uncertainty shrouding the new technology fuelled an appearance of e-cigarettes being the bathtub gin of nicotine consumption. An image that could soon be up in smoke as tobacco cartels acquire larger e-cigarette manufacturers threatening their worldwide hegemony over nicotine sales.

Phillip Morris International, among others, have aggressively moved into the vaporiser industry in the face of a 3.9% dilution in predicted earnings per share in 2014.

PMI recently announced the acquisition of UK based e-cigarette company Nicocigs Ltd, giving the tobacco giant a purported 27% share of the UK vaporiser market. This is in addition to PMI’s €500 million investment into the EU’s first e-cigarette manufacturing plant in Bologna, Italy. Once fully operational in 2016 the plant is expected to produce up to 30 billion units yearly.

“The development and commercialization of reduced-risk products represents a significant step toward achieving the public health objective of harm reduction, a potential paradigm shift for the industry, and an important growth opportunity for PMI. This first factory investment is a milestone in our roadmap toward making these products available to adult smokers," André Calantzopoulos, PMI’s Chief Executive Officer, said in a press release.

In possibly unrelated news, a recent announcement saw e-cigarettes classified alongside traditional NRTs as medicines in the UK - giving tobacco companies the enviable economic position of supplying both the cause and cure for a public health crisis.

Could they ever be legal in Australia?

As safety regulations and steadily increasing tobacco tariffs make it harder and harder to manufacture and sell cigarettes at a profit in Australia, big tobacco’s “roadmap” could include opening the Aussie market to digital durries.

According to the 2013 Poisons Standards, nicotine outside that packaged for smoking is a schedule 4 prescription only medicine “except for use as an aid in withdrawal from tobacco smoking in preparations for oromucosal or transdermal use.” Essentially meaning Nicabate patches and inhalers can be stocked on supermarket shelves under the guise of a remedy to cigarette withdrawals.

One speed bump on big tobacco’s “roadmap toward making these products available to adult smokers” is securing e-cigarettes’ addition to the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods alongside traditional quitting aids.

As the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s site attests, this requires a costly and detailed application evidencing “the beneficial effects of electronic cigarettes” through clinical and toxicological data. At the current time “no assessment of electronic cigarettes has been undertaken and, therefore, the quality and safety of electronic cigarettes is not known”.

However the requisite rigorous public health assessment is a timely and expensive process. As a point of reference, Business Insider reported the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will spend $US270 million on research projects to determine the risks of e-cigs, the results of which may not be ready until 2018.

Hopeful vapers have more than the TGA in their road to smokeless satisfaction. Any product designed to resemble cigarettes is outlawed in WA, SA and QLD under legislation originally instated to protect children against aggressive cigarette advertising like “FAGS”, the original candy “funstick” with a red tip

Vince Van Heerden, proprietor of Heavenly Vapours and the recipient of a $1,750 fine for selling e-cigarettes in Western Australia, is in the midst of appealing an April 10 Supreme Court decision against his business’ legality. According to Van Heerden’s crowdsourcing project, which has raised about $30,000, the appeal is based on E-cigarettes being a therapeutic product and therefore exempt from prohibition.

Given the fact e-juice containing nicotine is still a poison in Australia, and not “therapeutic” in a legal sense, it will be interesting to see how his legal team argue the point.

At the moment e-cigarettes are the hill-billy heroin of the nicotine industry; illegal, potentially dangerous and incredibly popular. What remains to be seen is if big tobacco’s support can take them from the trailer park to pharmacy shelves.