Legislators aim to bar e-cigarette sales to minors

Appearing on the Late Show, sassy actress Katherine Heigl puffed an electronic cigarette as she told David Letterman it had helped her kick a smoking habit and live healthier since becoming a mother.

Rather than applauding, Tami Gouveia, executive director of Tobacco Free Mass, is cheering a new bill to prohibit sale of e-cigarettes and other "nicotine-delivery devices’’ to anyone under 18 in Massachusetts.

Gouveia supports the bill filed last week by Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez, D-Jamaica Plain, because she’s concerned such devices when glamorized by celebrities, like Jenny McCarthy and Johnny Depp, encourage minors to smoke.

"We regard them as an initiation pathway to using cigarettes. It’s dangerous to think of e-cigarettes as less dangerous than regular cigarettes. That’s what the industry wants us to think,’’ she said.

Sanchez’ bill "prohibits sale of nicotine delivery products … to anyone under 18" and restricts retailers and manufacturers from providing samples of such products "except in tobacco stores and smoking bars.’’

Sanchez said he wrote his bill because current state laws "are silent on the availability of e-cigarettes to minors.’’

"Right now, my 7-year-old daughter could walk in and buy them at several locations and nobody would say anything. We want to make such products inaccessible to children. … We need to keep our children from becoming a new generation of nicotine addicts,’’ he said.

E-cigarettes and related products are currently sold under the name Smoke To Live: The Electronic Cigarette from a kiosk in the Natick Mall and can be purchased at several area tobacconists, package stores and from on-line sites.

Dvora Lieberman, regional manager for Smoke To Live, which operates in Massachusetts and three other states, said company policy prohibits sales to anyone under 18.

"If someone looks underage, we instruct our vendors to ask for IDs,’’ she said in a telephone interview. "If you’re going smoke cigarettes, e-cigarettes are better but they’re still addictive. It’s still a stimulant.’’

Lieberman said e-cigarettes can "definitely’’ help smokers quit traditional cigarettes which have many more harmful chemicals and they also provide "the option of reducing nicotine all the way down to zero if you want to quit.’’

She said e-cigarettes are also less harmful because they don’t burn and damage skin tissue and reduce the unpleasant tastes, smells and coughing associated with conventional cigarettes.

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