Smoke signals: why electronic cigarettes--unregulated and increasingly popular among young people--are worrying some U.S. officials.

• Author: Potenza, Alessandra
• Position: NATIONAL

Tiffany Harvey had never smoked cigarettes. Then last February, the 26-year-old student at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology saw an electronic cigarette on Instagram. Out of curiosity, she bought one and tried it. Harvey's been an e-cigarette smoker ever since.

"I like to smoke something that's flavored," she says.

Harvey isn't alone. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that the share of young people using e-cigarettes doubled in 2012 from the previous year. That worries U.S. health officials, who for decades have been making progress in helping people quit smoking--19 percent of adults smoke cigarettes today, versus 42 percent in 1965--or in preventing them from starting in the first place.

Though some doctors believe that e-cigarettes can help smokers quit, officials fear that e-cigs will create a new wave of nicotine addiction among young people: Studies show that teenagers who try a cigarette are twice as likely to become regular smokers compared with teenagers who've never tried one.

The CDC study found that 1.8 million middle- and high-school students said they had tried e-cigarettes in 2012.

"We think it's very worrisome," says Tim McAfee, director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the CDC.

Invented in China

Electronic cigarettes are battery-powered devices that vaporize liquid nicotine without burning cancer-causing tobacco, thus producing an odorless fog-like smoke. Although they're taking off now in the United States, e-cigarettes were invented in China 10 years ago by a pharmacist and heavy smoker named Hon Lik. He came up with the idea after his father died of lung cancer from smoking.

Because most e-cigarettes contain nicotine--the same addictive chemical found in tobacco cigarettes--they have stirred debate all over the world: Canada, Mexico, and Brazil have banned e-cigs altogether; Australia allows only brands that don't contain nicotine; the European Parliament, however, recently rejected a proposal to tightly regulate e-cigarettes in the E.U.'s 28 member countries.

In the U.S., where retail sales of e-cigs are expected to total $1.7 billion this year, electronic cigarettes remain unregulated. In 2009, after finding several toxic cancer-causing chemicals--including an ingredient used in antifreeze--in various types of e-cigarettes, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried to ban them, calling them unapproved drug-delivery gadgets. In 2010, a federal judge...