In St. Paul, cigarette regulations don't stop with the bar and restaurant ban. Single cigarette sales are prohibited, as are novelty lighters with cartoon characters on them.
If you try to sell candy cigarettes you'll get your hand slapped, as a soda shop discovered a few weeks ago.
Now the city is wrestling with the issue of how to regulate electronic cigarettes — battery-powered devices that resemble tobacco cigarettes but deliver a nicotine hit by inhaling vapor rather than smoke. Some are nicotine-free.
No less an authority than Council Member Dave Thune, a reluctant smoker who has nevertheless championed St. Paul's smoking bans, thinks that anything tougher than banning e-cigarette sales to minors would be overkill.
"It gives an alternative for people who are trying to quite smoking," he said Wednesday at the council meeting. "I've been trying to switch over to the electronic guys ... having tried them, there's no smoke. It's just carbon dioxide."
But anti-smoking groups warn that the health effects are still largely unknown, that the tobacco-free vapor likely contains harmful chemicals and that e-cigarettes make it harder to police regular smoking bans.
E-cigarettes come in a variety of flavors, ranging from tobacco to cappuccino and caramel apple pie. Some deliver lobelia, an herb that has similar properties to nicotine.
"The tobacco industry is now trying to find alternative ways to deliver nicotine," said Betsy Brock, research director for the Association for Nonsmokers-Minnesota. "It's dangerous the way they're promoting this as a safe alternative. This has not gone through that scrutiny."
