A Public Participation Forum for the FDA Center for Tobacco Products and its Federal Advisory Committee (TPSAC)

From: Huffington Post

Chicago may soon take a first step toward becoming the first major U.S. city to regulate the sale of e-cigarettes.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports Mayor Rahm Emanuel is joining forces with two powerful alderman — Will Burns (4th) and Ed Burke (14th) — to push for e-cigarettes in Chicago to be regulated as “tobacco products” and subject to the same restrictions as are outlined in the city’s existing smoking ban.

Specifically, that means they would be banned for minors and would also not be allowed to be smoked wherever traditional cigarettes are already banned.

Editor’s  Note:  The following article is an argument for the balanced regulation of e-cigarettes in lieu of draconian regulatory measures which will result in an underground market for the products.

From: The Washington Post

By Donna St. George

When a teacher noticed what looked like smoke rising in her Eastern Middle School classroom one day this fall, she quickly investigated, finding an eighth-grade boy holding an e-cigarette.

The “smoke” was vapor, but for Casey B. Crouse, principal at the Silver Spring school, the episode was the first signal of what she would learn is a troubling teen trend nationally: An increasing number of students using electronic devices that simulate tobacco smoking.

From: Somewhat Reasonable (Heartland)

I am honored to join Drs. Riccardo Polosa and Pasquale Caponnetto and their colleagues at the University of Catania in Italy as a coauthor of a new scientific article on e-cigarettes published in Harm Reduction Journal (available here).  We scientifically disprove the stated premise of a recent NPR broadcast (here), “… little is known about the potential health effects [of e-cigarettes].” NPR “expert” Stanton Glantz stated that “e-cigarettes today are the triumph of wishful thinking over data.”  Our publication shows that e-cigarettes are the triumph of scientific evidence over feigned ignorance.

For the benefit of members of the Flat Earth Society, I reproduce our summary here:

From: KCRG.com

By Dave Franzman, Reporter