Devices marketed as “electronic cigarettes” are in reality crude drug delivery systems for refined nicotine, posing unknown risks with little new benefits to smokers, according to tobacco control experts. In a “Perspective” published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the Legacy’s Steven A. Schroeder National Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies explore the current regulatory climate around electronic cigarettes (“e-cigarettes”) and their safety. The authors, Nathan K. Cobb, MD, a pulmonologist and assistant professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, and David B. Abrams, PhD, executive director of the Schroeder Institute, also question future implications for physicians, policy makers and e-cigarette users.
