Should Canada should allow sale of electronic cigarettes?

I managed to get through my youth without trying cigarettes, probably because everyone in my household smoked and family car trips involved me in the back seat trying to breathe air that would get a thumbs down from a Beijing pollution monitor.

So I don't see the attraction of electronic cigarettes, which simulate smoking using cartridges of nicotine-juiced liquid and a heat element to vapourize it.

National Post commentator Jesse Kline is campaigning for Health Canada to lift a ban on e-smokes. He suggests the government is in cahoots with the tobacco industry to bar a more benign nicotine-delivery system from competing with cigarettes, threatening billions in tobacco tax revenue.

"As University of Ottawa professor and tobacco control expert David Sweanor put it, e-cigarettes are 'exactly what the tobacco companies have been afraid of all these years' — a tobacco-free cigarette alternative," Kline writes.

E-smokes were apparently invented almost a decade ago by a Chinese pharmacist. The company he worked for has been marketing them under the name Ruyan (which means "like smoke").

The devices are made to look just like cigarettes, cigars, even pipes. The liquid, made of common food additives and nicotine, is vapourized by the faux ciggy and inhaled without also exposing users to tobacco's deadly mix of carcinogens.

Anti-tobacco groups and some researchers have embraced e-smokes.

But Health Canada issued a bulletin in 2009 advising Canadians not to use them.

"Nicotine is a highly addictive and toxic substance, and the inhalation of propylene glycol (the food additive) is a known irritant," the bulletin says. "Although these electronic smoking products may be marketed as a safer alternative to conventional tobacco products and, in some cases, as an aid to quitting smoking, electronic smoking products may pose risks such as nicotine poisoning and addiction."

While Ottawa hasn't approved the sale of the nicotine-laced e-smoke cartridges, Link says Canadians were having little trouble buying them, at least until Health Canada, backed by the RCMP, began cracking down.

Follow the money, Link argues. The federal government collected $20.4 billion in tobacco taxes between 2001 and 2008, he says.

"Rather than implementing policies that are in the best interests of Canadians, it is the government that has become addicted to the lucrative tobacco industry," he writes. "It's time to break the addiction: End the Canadian ban on electronic cigarettes."

Let's ignoring for the moment that fact someone puffing on a phoney cigarette will look like a dork. The thing I wonder about is whether e-smokes could attract young non-smokers who then decide they want to try the real thing? I think I'm with the feds on this one.