4. “We’re advertising like it’s 1960 - while we still can.”

E-cigarettes have so far evaded many of the restrictions that tobacco cigarettes are subject to: You won’t see a Surgeon General’s warning on e-cig packages, for instance. You will see them advertised on TV, from which cigarette ads have been banned since 1971. And you’ll see them promoted by celebrities - another no-no for cigarette marketers.

Indeed, there are now an estimated 250 brands of e-cigarettes sold in stores and online, and virtually no federal regulations on them. Some state regulators have sued e-cigarette brands over misleading advertising, so companies stop short of making health or smoking cessation claims, which the FDA would have to verify. “Many of these are mom-and-pop businesses, many of them are in China, and we really don’t know what’s in them or what sort of quality-control measures are used,” Fiore says. “It’s the wild, wild West out there.”

The FDA plans to issue new rules soon, however, and state lawmakers have tried to improvise a few of their own. Public health experts say the industry has run wild in the meantime, and is getting away with behavior that would not be tolerated from traditional tobacco, including glamorous marketing, failing to list ingredients and selling to kids. Even flash-sale sites like LivingSocial have offered deals on e-cigs. (Amazon, however, prohibits sales of them.) “It’s concerning to me that it has gone forward with no regulation, no restrictions and really no oversight,” says Sheelah Feinberg, executive director of the New York City Coalition for a Smoke-Free City, a non-profit. “There are trucks that just stop in neighborhoods and hand out free e-cigarettes, and they’re not necessarily doing an ID check when they hand them out.”

E-cigarette industry representatives, for their part, say they are just as eager for government watchdogs. “Reasonable regulation” can benefit adult tobacco consumers by providing “sound science” about the risks of e-cigarettes relative to conventional cigarettes, Altria’s May says.

5. “We defy categorization.”

The e-cigarette industry says it welcomes regulation, but it’s also shown some ambivalence: On the one hand, it doesn’t want to be grouped with cigarettes and tobacco, because that would entail restrictions on who can buy them and how they can be advertised and because it has staked its success on being an alternative to those products. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to put its product on the shelf until it can be proven safe enough to get its own category. The industry would have to go through years of trials and FDA approval as a drug or drug-delivery device, effectively taking e-cigs off the market entirely, says Criss, the head of the the ECIG trade group. “I don’t really feel that it’s a tobacco product,” he says, “that’s maybe a compromise position that we maybe don’t think of as ideal.” (Altria, however, says its e-cigarette meets the definition of a tobacco product.)

So far, e-cigarettes have managed to dodge being categorized as cigarettes or tobacco. And two e-cigarette brands, NJOY and Smoking Everywhere, successfully sued when the FDA tried to regulate electronic cigarettes as drug-delivery devices, blocking the FDA’s restrictions. But the lack of categorization probably won’t last much longer: The FDA is expected to issue long-awaited rules regulating e-cigs as a tobacco product later this fall.

  6. “We look like cigarettes, but please don’t tax us like cigarettes.”

E-cigarettes’ biggest advantage over traditional cigarettes is their price, market analysts say. Regular cigarettes carry high excise taxes of up to about 50% of their retail price; e-cigarettes, for the most part, are currently only subject to sales tax, says Wells Fargo tobacco analyst Herzog.

The price of an e-cigarette, meanwhile, is hard to compare with that of a regular cigarette, as the electronic devices are sold to be either disposable or refillable and rechargeable. But assuming that it takes 1.25 e-cigarettes (or cartridges) to deliver the nicotine in a pack of cigarettes, and the average e-cigarette costs about $7, Herzog estimatesthat e-cigarettes are nearly 8% cheaper than cigarettes.“E-cigs are definitely more affordable than conventional cigarettes,” she says, adding that e-cigarettes’ price per usage falls with greater consumption.

Government regulation, however, and accompanying taxes are likely to increase prices, which could erode the price advantage very quickly. The industry, of course, opposes heavy taxes, arguing that making e-cigarettes more expensive could deter smokers from switching to something potentially better for their health. ““If you’re taxing combustible cigarettes because of the need to offset higher health care costs that’s one thing, but if there’s no higher health care costs because of e-cigs, that’s harder to justify,” Herzog says. Reynolds American adds that because its Vuse e-cigarette “is not a cigarette, and does not contain any tobacco, we do not believe it should be taxed the same as cigarettes,” Howard says. Herzog nonetheless predicts that e-cigarettes will be taxed 5% of their retail price next year, 10% by 2015 and 20% by 2019.