Kodak moment

THE vapoteurs who gathered on a windy island in the Seine on September 19th brandished e-cigarettes in one hand and flyers inciting the populace to defend them in the other. On October 8th the European Parliament is to vote on a proposal to regulate the devices as if they were medical products. Brice Lepoutre, president of the Independent Association of Electronic-Cigarette Users, is outraged. “We are at the dawn of a revolution in the fight against tobacco,” he says. He will join like-minded Europeans in Strasbourg at a demonstration against the proposal before the vote.

Smoking is falling in most rich countries, but “vaping” is rising. In Europe 7m people are thought to be using e-cigarettes, which vaporise a solution containing nicotine without the toxins from burning tobacco. Sales of e-cigs in America may treble this year, according to figures from Bonnie Herzog of Wells Fargo, a bank. She thinks their consumption could overtake that of ordinary cigarettes in a decade. If regulators let them.

Health authorities worldwide are struggling to deal with this new way of getting a nicotine kick. E-cigarettes are sold as leisure products and as such are covered by safety and quality standards wherever these exist and are implemented. But leaving them, like shoes or beds, to such catch-all rules makes some regulators uneasy.

A growing pile of studies say they are far safer than normal cigarettes and at least as good at getting people to quit smoking as nicotine patches and gum. But they too are based on that addictive substance. Churned out by hundreds of suppliers using materials from China and elsewhere, the quality and labelling of e-cigarettes on sale are uneven.

One worry is that young people will be lured into a dependence on nicotine they would otherwise have avoided—though so far the numbers who had never smoked but have become regular users of e-cigarettes seem minuscule. Another concern is that smokers who might have quit their expensive and inconvenient habit will carry on, switching to e-cigs in places where smoking is banned—though some studies suggest e-cigs do encourage them to smoke less tobacco. A third fear is that these strangely trendy products will reglamorise smoking after years of campaigns, tax increases and restrictions have relegated it to the doghouse.

One approach is simply to tighten manufacturing and product standards, or bring in a specific set of rules rather like those governing cosmetics. But there are other considerations. Electric smokes compete with cigarettes yet do not in most places face the same restrictions, to say nothing of excise taxes. They compete with smoking-cessation products yet do not usually have to secure prior approval for products or make them to pharmaceutical standards. If they are required to do either, their price will rise, variety will fall and the uptake by consumers, who are overwhelmingly smokers, will be cut.

Health authorities used to smiting nicotine are broadly unkeen on e-cigarettes. The World Health Organisation does not encourage them. America’s Food and Drug Administration is expected to propose restrictions in October. In 2009 it claimed that e-cigarettes were unapproved medical products, but a court said they should be regulated as tobacco products instead.

The staid tobacco industry is beginning to wonder if it is reaching a “Kodak moment”, its version of the point at which the world’s leading maker of camera film realised that consumers had gone digital, and it was too late to chase them.

To avoid that fate the tobacco firms are beginning to appropriate what Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, has called one of the world’s eight most disruptive technologies. Most have taken stakes in e-cigarette companies or developed their own products. They are working on other sorts of less-toxic offerings too. Philip Morris International expects to market a device to heat rather than burn tobacco by 2017. Next-generation products at British American Tobacco include a nicotine-inhaler, for which it hopes to get regulatory approval in Britain. Whichever way consumers and regulators jump, the tobacco giants intend, unlike Kodak, to have a product to peddle.

Back in Strasbourg, the bars are buzzing as deals are struck on amendments to be proposed by October 2nd. Fans of e-cigarettes hope to carve out an exemption from medical regulation for those that do not claim therapeutic properties. Most agree (including e-cigarette makers) that they should not be sold to children, and that quality controls could be strengthened.

But these are details. The goal, according to Clive Bates, a former director of Action on Smoking and Health, a British campaigning group, and a tireless advocate of e-cigarettes, is not to lose the chance of millions of smokers switching in whole or in part to a relatively benign alternative. “The market is producing, at no cost to the taxpayer, an emerging triumph of public health,” he says.