Charles Platiau/Reuters
Health officials say the safety of electronic cigarettes has not been medically proved.
PARIS — On a recent day in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, a line of 20 people spilled onto the sidewalk of a trendy new boutique, eager to get a taste of its latest gourmet offerings.
Reynolds American, via Associated Press
Reynolds American said this month that it would introduce a revamped e-cig with an ad campaign including television commercials.
A sign in the window promoted piña colada as the store’s flavor of the month. A woman wearing a Chanel jacket said she wanted to try peach.
But this was no temple of gastronomy. It was one of scores of electronic cigarette shops that have been springing up by the week in Paris as well as in numerous cities across Europe and the United States. Inside the ClopiNette boutique, shoppers can choose from among more than 60 flavors of nicotine liquid — including Marlboro and Lucky Strike flavors — all in varying strengths and arranged in color-coded rows. (ClopiNette is a play on “clope,” French slang for a cigarette.)
“It’s like visiting a Nespresso store,” said Anne Stephan, a lawyer specializing in health issues at a nearby law firm.
What’s driving her into the store is a desire shared by many: they want to give up smoking tobacco but don’t want to kick the smoking habit. After smoking 20 cigarettes daily for 25 years and failing to quit, Ms. Stephan said she had cut down to one a day in the three months since she began puffing on a so-called e-cig. Using technology that turns nicotine-infused propylene glycol into an inhalable vapor, e-cigarettes smoke almost like the real thing, without the ashtray odor.
While e-cigarettes are still a fraction of the $80 billion-a-year market for smoking products in the United States, the growing popularity of vaping, as the practice is known, has touched off a clash in Europe between retailers and regulators. On Wednesday, the British government announced it would begin treating e-cigarettes as medicines, “so that people using these products have the confidence they are safe, are of the right quality and work.”
E-cigarettes and other nicotine products will be licensed in Britain starting in 2016, giving manufacturers time to ensure that their products comply with all standards for medicines. The British regulator says e-cigarettes aren’t recommended for use until then, but it won’t ban them entirely. Government officials in France this month announced they might ban the e-cigarettes in public spaces. Italy is considering banning them from schools.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration tried to block the sale of e-cigarettes, claiming that they were unapproved “drug/device combinations.” Manufacturers successfully challenged the agency’s position, but in a 2010 ruling, a federal appeals court held that e-cigarettes could be regulated by the agency as tobacco products.
An agency spokeswoman, Stephanie Yao, said the agency was preparing to release for public comment a proposed rule to regulate additional categories of tobacco products.
Currently, the F.D.A.’s tobacco regulations apply to cigarettes, tobacco and smokeless tobacco.
“Further research is needed to assess the potential public health benefits and risks of electronic cigarettes and other novel tobacco products,” Ms. Yao said in a statement.
Health officials say their safety has not been medically proved and the devices could encourage children to take up smoking. Some antismoking advocates, who are simply annoyed to see the gadgets glowing in restaurants and bars, call for a ban on their use in public places, the same ban in force for tobacco products.
The allure is unmistakable. The actor Leonardo DiCaprio was spotted puffing on an e-cig at Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood earlier this year, while the French actress Catherine Deneuve, a longtime heavy smoker, now puffs the electronic version in Parisian restaurants and even during news conferences.
Global sales jumped 30 percent in each of the previous three years to around $2 billion in 2011, with the European market around $650 million, according to a recent analysis by Euromonitor International. Retail sales of e-cigs in the United States reached $500 million last year. Although that is only about 0.5 percent of the overall tobacco market, analysts expect those figures to double this year and continue climbing.
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