Still looks like they're trying to give it the kiss of death to me. Relevant: http://www.mhra.gov.uk/home/groups/comms-ic/documents/websiteresources/con286852

Still looks like they're trying to give it the kiss of death to me. Relevant: http://www.mhra.gov.uk/home/groups/comms-ic/documents/websiteresources/con286852.pdf http://www.mhra.gov.uk/home/groups/comms-ic/documents/websit... Now, complying with regulation for medical devices is very expensive. Their high end estimate for the costs to a company that wanted to import _a_ product into the UK for sale sits at £266,000. A figure I consider to be rather optimistically low. And that assuming that '57. Our MA cost estimates assume that applicants would not have to conduct expensive animal and post-market-authorisation human clinical trials to satisfy MHRA that the risks to health from long term inhalation of ENDS vapour are acceptable. However, this may not be the case and MHRA assessors might ask for these additional trials. The one-off costs of conducting these additional trials would probably run into several hundreds of thousands of pounds. ' A lot of the strength of the e-cig market is in its diversity, you can get a lot of different flavours, and a lot of different devices to get the experience you want. Which this sort of thing would make very costly. And it's worth noting that the MHRA is fairly blatantly against diversity in flavours, it's even mentioned as one of the things they'd do in options 1. And all this in a paper that notes: 'The policy might only need to be marginally unsuccessful for it to be considered a costly failure. If the design and implementation of the policy has the effect of reducing access to NCPs (particularly ENDS) then it is possible that the number of successful quit attempts could decline. If there were no substantial countervailing health gains from improvements in safety, the policy’s overall impact could be highly negative.' If they push this through to the hilt, I rather suspect that we'll end up with just the big companies trading their crappy little fake-cigs. At this stage it's a matter of seeing how the EU breaks on the issue. With big tobacco attempting to kill off their competitors before they become large enough to defend themselves, BT being one of the few who can afford that sort of thing, I'm not hugely hopeful of that.