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MEPs have approved new and stringent rules on e-cigarettes, banning advertising and limiting nicotine content to 20mg/ml beginning in 2016.

The California Department of Public Health's new "Protect Your Family from E-Cigarettes" campaign is a rag-tag collection of lies covering a lot of ground, like some prohibitionist Gish gallop replete with straw men, half truths and outright demonstrable falsehoods, masquerading as “the Facts You Need to Know.”

Recap of Vapetoberfest at the Long Beach Convention Center.

E-cigarettes are harmful, sold by the tobacco industry, contain toxic and cancer-causing chemicals, emit a “pollution cloud” that does “second-hand harm to others” and are just the "latest gimmick" from Big Tobacco, according to the new #CurbIt campaign from the San Francisco Tobacco Free Project.

As everyone has heard by now, the FDA’s disastrous proposal to regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products has gone ahead with none of the changes vaping advocates may have been hoping for. We wanted continued innovation with improved product standards; we got thinly-veiled prohibition.

The FDA, which claims to stand for “science-based regulation,” seems incapable of drawing even the most basic of conclusions: e-cigarettes, regulated or unregulated, are vastly safer than tobacco cigarettes and should be treated as such.

Oklahoma Senator Rob Johnson’s proposed bill to impose a small tax on e-cigs, formally ban their sale to minors and require any vendors to be licensed seems like a harmless and sensible piece of legislation on first reading about it. However, there is a darker vein lurking in the densely layered legalese and clunky phrases like “vapor products,” since the bill would also make it illegal to buy e-cigs online and for sellers in the state to buy their products from anybody other than Oklahoma-based distributor or wholesaler.

With yet more bans on indoor vaping, anti-THR research, a litany of litigation, more “think of the children” nonsense designed to drum up support for restrictions on vaping and public health advocates starting to wonder how they should reconcile their evidence-free opposition to vaping with the growing body of evidence that it’s much safer than smoking, it’s the Week in Vaping.

Today the Royal Society became the site of the E-Cigarette Summit, a day dedicated to debating the safety, efficacy and regulation of e-cigarettes. The day was split into three sessions, firstly looking at the safety and efficacy, then moving on to regulation, and finally looking at the controversies surrounding the technology.

The Welsh government has announced that it will ban vaping in enclosed public places under a new public health law, igniting much debate about the pros and cons of such a decision. It's argued that vaping could pose a health risk to bystanders and may re-normalize smoking, but are these concerns justified?

The FDA has issued their first approval for an e-cigarette to be sold in the US. The approved vape is the Vuse Solo, a big tobacco-backed device and its accompanying tobacco cartridge.

Health authorities in Mexico have closed down two vape stores in Mexico City, seizing almost 9,500 devices and citing the technical illegality of e-cigarettes in the country. For the two years prior to this seizure, only around 2,200 devices had been seized, and this may be an indication that authorities are planning on stepping up activity against vaping.

It’s time for the Week in Vaping. This week, flavors are luring teens into vaping (they aren’t), vaping impedes quitting (it doesn’t), indoor vaping bans are necessary for public health (they aren’t) and Public Health England were just hypnotized by the tobacco industry into saying e-cigarettes are much safer than cigarettes (of course!).

“Won’t somebody please think of the children” is one of the core rallying calls of the anti-vaping fanatics, and Cancer Research UK is evidently paying attention.

The FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products has announced it will be holding a public listening session to discuss “any topic relevant to science-based regulation of tobacco products” on April 5th in San Diego.

In a disarmingly rational decision, lawmakers in North Dakota have passed a bill that both bans the sale and use of e-cigarettes by minors and classifies them as non-tobacco products. Instead, they passed another bill classifying e-cigarettes as “nicotine devices.”

It's been jam-packed with research this week, from studies leading to claims that vaping will cause lung cancer to ones finding little to no risk of passive vaping, but there's also been the usual selection of new pieces of legislation, excellent blog posts from the community and some serious nonsense spouted about e-cigs. It's the Week in Vaping.

With more vaping bans proposed, some movements on the FDA regulations, a couple of new e-cigarette studies, several great articles on vaping from inside and outside the community, and one of the most thoroughly absurd winners of “Bullshit of the Week” so far: here’s the Week in Vaping.

Last week, while the city of New York debated adding e-cigarettes to the Clean Indoor Air Act, Los Angeles voted on a motion to draft an ordinance regulating usage of the devices wherever smoking is prohibited.