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Boston health officials today voted to treat electronic cigarettes, known as e-cigarettes, like tobacco products, banning use of the increasingly popular products in the workplace and restricting their sale to adults only.

The good news is electronic cigarettes can not be banned as they have just received "legal" classification as a tobacco product.

RICHMOND, Va. -- The Food and Drug Administration is saying in letters to two tobacco companies that flavored, dissolvable tobacco products - that the agency compares with candy and says contain a lot of nicotine - could be particularly appealing to kids and young adults.

Electronic cigarettes are opening a new front in the tobacco wars as state and local lawmakers try to restrict the product, which may allow users to circumvent smoking bans.

WASHINGTON — A US law banning the selling of so-called "light" or "mild" cigarettes took effect Tuesday, but some anti-tobacco groups say the makers are sidestepping the rules by using color-coding packaging.

The packaging says, "Your Marlboro Lights pack is changing. But your cigarette stays the same. In the future, ask for 'Marlboro in the gold pack."

A federal judge said Thursday the Food and Drug Administration cannot stop shipments of electronic cigarettes into the United States.

Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. Because Diamond Foods made truthful claims about the health benefits of consuming walnuts that the FDA didn’t approve, it sent the company a letter declaring, “Your walnut products are drugs” — and “new drugs” at that — and, therefore, “they may not legally be marketed … in the United States without an approved new drug application.” The agency even threatened Diamond with “seizure” if it failed to comply.

SFO banned electronic cigarettes earlier this month and now the city is in the first stages of banning them. The plan is to fold them into the current smoking ordinance, saying that anything that looks, feels or functions like a cigarette is a cigarette and has to be banned from public places.

As of September 1, it won’t be illegal to possess flavored cigarettes, but it will be illegal to sell them. As a result, clove cigarettes, which have been imported from Indonesia and sold in the U.S. since 1968, and cigarettes flavors like cherry and chocolate mocha are about to become a controlled substance.

Philip-Morris—the tobacco giant who controls fully half of the U.S. cigarette market share—had its tarry hands all over the passage of this legislation.