They've started popping up everywhere. At first shyly, but now more openly, more tribal, more proud.
Vapers who smoke e-cigarettes using nicotine liquid are doing so in a grey area,
Importing from China and elsewhere, what is, in fact, a scheduled poison in many states jurisdictions.
Public health academic, Professor Simon Chapman says it's often hard to tell what's actually in the nicotine liquid.
"People are able to import enough e-cigarette liquid for personal use but not to sell it for commercial purposes," says Professor Chapman. "In fact, many of the liquids which are being sold as non-nicotine containing do contain nicotine."
The law is inconsistent at best.
A landmark Western Australia Supreme Court case found that e-cigarettes without nicotine still breach tobacco controls.
Professor Chapman is part of a new effort to force the United Nations’ health body to act on unified regulation.
"There have been 129 scientists and leading public health figures from 31 countries around the world who have written to the WHO's director general," says Chapman. "We've basically said this is too an important issue to just let run in the marketplace."
The popularity of e-ciggs has grown so quickly that medical research and regulatory frameworks have constantly been left inadequate.
There's research on both sides of the debate about their harm. Now, the FDA in the US is struggling to regulate their $2 billion dollar industry.
"Well I think it's out of control in the USA and very few countries internationally look to the USA as a model for how they should regulate anything in the tobacco area," says Professor Chapman. "The real issue, I think, is that we need to set standard for e-cigarettes so that people who are going to be using them can be assured that the quality of them are them are good... we have no idea of the quality control of the products that people are buying."
Here in Australia the Therapeutic Goods Administration requires evidence of their effectiveness in giving up smoking before their allowed to be marketed as such.
"Regulation would go to ingredients, it would go to labelling, it would go to safety of the containers so that kids can't get hold of them and swallow them, and it would go the the claims that can be made by people selling these products."
For vapers themselves, their fears that the loophole that's allowed them their nitcotine fix up till now will close, seems ever more likely.
