New Yorkers who’ve latched on to electronic cigarettes to get their nicotine fix at the local bar had their hopes snuffed out Thursday as the New York City Council overwhelmingly voted to add the smokeless smokes to the city’s ban on smoking in public places.

Even though the electronic cigarettes don’t produce secondhand smoke, the council voted 43 8 to ban the use of e cigarettes in restaurants, bars, city parks and any other places where smoking is already outlawed.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg who’s advocated, not always successfully, for a number of public health initiatives, like bans on plastic foam containers and sodas larger than 16 ounces is expected to sign the measure as one of his last actions in office, NBC New York reported.

If he does sign it, the ban would take effect in about four months.

Council President Christine Quinn said banning e cigarettes would make it easier to enforce the city’s ban on real smoking. Because they’re designed to look like real cigarettes, it can be tough for law enforcement officers, business owners and club bouncers to tell who’s really smoking and who’s only “vaping.”

Scientists generally agree that e cigarettes are less dangerous than real cigarettes, and researchers reported in September in the British medical journal The Lancet that they work about as well as nicotine patches in helping smokers quit.

They’re still highly addictive, however, and Quinn said OK’ing them could create new customers for tobacco products and undercut the message that smoking is something you should do only at home.

“We don’t want a step backward with that,” she said.

But Miguel Martin, president of Logic Technology Development, the nation’s third largest e cigarette manufacturer, argued that e cigarettes weren’t a gateway to real tobacco.

“That’s a non issue,” Martin told CNBC on Thursday. “The data indicates that about 99 percent of the vast amount of users of electronic cigarettes are already smokers.”

“We’re disappointed in the City Council’s position,” he said.

Most major U.S. cities have already banned smoking in indoors public places, in step with decades of evidence that tobacco is the leading preventable cause of dis ease, dis ability and death in the U.S.

Only a few places among them New Jersey, Arkansas, Utah and North Dakota, according to The Associated Press have included e cigarettes in their bans. But other major cities had been watching New York and were considering similar proposals, including Los Angeles and Chicago.

The City Council passed the measure in a flurry of activity during its final session of the year Thursday. It also endorsed Bloomberg’s call to phase in a ban on plastic foam food containers and passed a bill to set up a website to help people track how federal money is being spent on cleaning up after Superstorm Sandy.

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E-cigarettes could become ‘medicines’ available on nhs

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E cigarettes could be available on the NHS by the end of the year with at least two companies one a subsidiary of British American Tobacco having already embarked on the process of obtaining licences from the medicines regulator.

The UK company Nicolites said its application was “well advanced” while BAT’s Nicoventures has also started the process, although decisions on whether their products are prescribed on the NHS will be made by local commissioning groups.

The status of “medicines” will give the companies commercial advantage and allow the e cigarette makers to market their product internationally, including in sponsorship deals, a move that will be banned for competitors not in the same bracket.

The news came to light as ministers in England prepare to ban the sale of e cigarettes to under 18s Wales and Scotland are likely to follow suit.

The Committees of Advertising Practice are also about to launch a consultation on new rules to cover e cigarettes, used by 1.3 million people in Britain last year. It will start later this month, with the framework likely to be in place by autumn, nearly two years after the first TV adverts for such products.

The applications to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority are a victory for the regulator’s determination to persuade manufacturers and importers to apply voluntarily for a licence and meet specific rules including on the amount of nicotine provided. They are continuing the process even though the European parliament defeated UK attempts to make medicinal licensing compulsory for e cigarettes last autumn,.

Existing anti smoking therapies such as gums, patches, an inhaler, and a mouthspray already have medicine licences and have been endorsed by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which advises on good practice and value for money. Nearly 1.4m prescriptions for them were issued in England in 2012, but licensed e cigarettes would not need a separate Nice assessment.

Nikhil Nathwani, managing director of Nicolites, said the company was “well advanced in the product’s licencing” and hoped to achieve marketing authorisation some time this year. It was working closely with the government, the regulator and Nice. “This will be continued even after marketing authorisation has been achieved”, he said. Nicoventures has also made a licence application for a nicotine inhalation device to the MHRA.

A spokesman for BAT, which already has a standard e cigarette brand, Vype, on sale in Britain, said the company would like to see “a regulatory approach that puts consumer safety and product quality first, while allowing the appropriate level of innovation, marketing and distribution freedoms to allow this important new product category to grow.”

A spokesperson for Njoy, a big US cigarette company, which has also endorsed MHRA regulation, could not say whether an application was in progress, when contacted.

The readiness of big e cigarette players to go down the voluntary route for the expensive process of medicines approval is in sharp contrast to the position of the UK trade body for e cigarettes, Ecita, which has railed against the over regulation it claims will be introduced EU wide.

E cigarettes classed only as consumer products from 2016 will have to carry health warnings that nicotine is highly addictive. The draft EU directive, which has still to complete its legislative process in the coming months also contains new curbs on tobacco including health warnings covering nearly two thirds of cigarette packs.

This article was amended on 3 February 2014 because it is the Committees of Advertising Practice who are launching a consultation on new rules to cover advertising e cigarettes, not the Advertising Standards Agency as the original said.