COMPANIES vying for a stake in the fast-growing e-cigs business are reviving the decades-old marketing tactics the tobacco industry used to hook generations of people on regular cigarettes.
They're using cab-top and bus stop displays, sponsoring race cars and events, and encouraging smokers to "rise from the ashes'' and take back their freedom in slick TV commercials featuring celebrities like TV personality Jenny McCarthy.
The Food and Drug Administration plans to set marketing and product regulations for electronic cigarettes in the near future. But for now, almost anything goes.
"Right now it's the wild, wild west,'' Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Electronic cigarettes are battery-powered devices made of plastic or metal that heat a liquid nicotine solution, creating vapor that users inhale. Users get their nicotine without the thousands of chemicals, tar or odor of regular cigarettes. And they get to hold something shaped like a cigarette, while puffing and exhaling something that looks like smoke.
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