Toby Melville/Reuters
An electronic cigarette seller in London smoked one of his products. The European Parliament decided last month not to restrict e-cigarettes.
BRUSSELS — Facing a decision on whether to impose tight restrictions on a booming market for electronic cigarettes, members of the European Parliament received a pleading letter in September that was signed by thousands of former smokers worried that "the positive story of e-cigarettes may be about to come to an abrupt halt."
The signatures had been collected via a website, saveecigs.com, which proclaimed itself the voice of the "forgotten millions in this debate" — people who had taken up e-cigarettes to stop smoking, and their grateful families.
The website, however, was not quite the grass-roots effort it claimed to be. The text of the letter it asked people to sign was drafted by a London lobbyist hired by Totally Wicked, an e-cigarette company. The website had been set up by a British woman living in Iceland who had previously worked for the owners of Totally Wicked.
As the headquarters of the European Union, Brussels sets regulatory standards that resonate around the world. It rivals Washington as a focus for corporate lobbying, with an estimated 30,000 professional lobbyists with registered lobbying firms and thousands more who operate beneath the radar.
In this case, a determined lobbying campaign, marrying corporate interests in a fledgling but fast-growing industry with voices elicited from the general public, was aimed at a compelling public health issue: whether e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine without burning tobacco, should be regulated as medicinal products, just as nicotine patches are.
The stakes were substantial. Although e-cigarettes have not been linked to any serious health issues, they have been in widespread use for such a short time that researchers have no basis yet for determining if there are long-term risks. The decision by the European Union would set the stage for a debate over the extent of regulation in the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration is soon expected to issue its own rules on nicotine-delivery devices. The outcome of the battle in Brussels could go a long way in shaping the competitive landscape of the business in Europe and beyond.
The odds seemed very much against the e-cigarette industry. Hostility toward corporate lobbying runs deep in the European Union bureaucracy and legislature. And lawmakers were seemingly on track to categorize e-cigarettes as medicinal.
Yet the outcome, driven in large part by the industry's success in mobilizing a wave of support from consumers and using it to apply political pressure to lawmakers, amounted to a big victory for e-cigarette sellers, one in which they outgunned not just the tobacco companies but also pharmaceutical companies that make competing products for people trying to stop smoking.
To the delight of companies like Totally Wicked, the European Parliament voted Oct. 8 to scrap proposals by health officials to regulate e-cigarettes as a medicinal product, which would have restricted their sale to pharmacies in many countries of the 28-nation bloc and imposed costly certification procedures on producers. The Parliament's decision did not end the argument, but it lifted a big, immediate cloud threatening a business that some Wall Street analysts predict could be bigger than tobacco within a decade.
When the European Commission initially proposed last December that e-cigarettes be treated like medicines, the industry immediately realized that "we had a very big problem and a big fight ahead," recalled Ray Story, the American president of United Tobacco Vapor Group, an e-cigarette company with offices in Atlanta and Amsterdam.
Determined to avoid a precedent that would most likely harden the regulation of e-cigarettes far beyond Europe, Mr. Story hired EPPA, an established Brussels lobbying company, and a prominent Belgian law firm, Van Bael & Bellis. They pressed the argument that "e-cigarettes are not a drug" and that any decision to classify them as such would be vigorously challenged in court.
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