Sharon I think we have had a previous discussion on this thread. Conclusions were, as I remember : 1. there are no tobacco related health issues from these "cigarettes" other than the nicotine content which can already be found in approved patches and gums 2. there may be some health effects from the vaporised carrier fluid. As yet undefined and not quantified. 3. Some organisations ban them as "they might make others envious" or they are too difficult to distinguish from a real cigarette" 4. I tried them and went back to my pipe. Merv

At the risk of stating the obvious, I guess that there's now a sudden massive demand by all UK bus and coach operators for signs to display in their vehicles to tell passengers that the established ban on smoking now includes 'electronic cigarettes'.

Yes you can use them but remember that they now carry an enormous risk - the armed police will turn up, make you and your colleagues sit on the ground and point their guns at you!

Nice one. I can just see the packages now displaying an image of a loaded gun pointing at your head rather than a tar-filled lung or someones teeth affected by smoking!!

They are lucky it was yesterday and it was sunny, wouldnt have liked being stuck out in todays rain! Good training exercise for the services though.

I work offshore in the Oil & Gas Industry and the company who owns the oilfield we work on has banned them from being brought ofshore. One of the reasons being that they are simply not intrinsically safe. It would not be to clever to have one in your pocket with the potential to cause a spark (battery power) in an area processing large quantities of hydrocarbons...onshore process plant & refinery personnel beware!

messyshaw – Perhaps you’ve misunderstood my response at #4: It comprised a suggestion that bus and coach operators will be very determined to try and protect their drivers and passengers from circumstances similar to those which occurred last Thursday, and certainly not a call for e-cigs to be banned. From a skim through the responses to the online media reports about the M6 incident, it seemed that quite a number of them argued that e-cigs could be used anywhere because they did not come within the ambit of the law which bans conventional smoking in various settings. However, as others have already pointed out in this thread, allowing people to use e-cigs in situations where conventional smoking is banned would pose various problems. Furthermore, even if there were no law against smoking on coaches and buses, surely it would be reasonable for any operating company to impose its own ban on smoking by passengers for various reasons, e.g. the health and comfort of non-smoking passengers, cleanliness and fire precautions. Though none of us were involved in the M6 incident, I guess that many of us have similar views based on what has been reported about it: The person who was using the e-cig on the coach was allegedly doing so in a furtive manner. If so, this suggests that he/she was aware of the legal ban on smoking on coaches and was either unsure about or thought it also extended to the use of e-cigs. Furthermore, his/her behaviour was apparently suspicious enough to alarm a fellow passenger and prompt them to contact the police by mobile phone. Anyhow, after what the coach driver and passengers subsequently experienced, it’s likely that the e-cig user will desist from using e-cigs on coaches in future! (From personal experience of having been arrested at gunpoint and then detained for over 5 hours quite a number of years ago, I have some inkling of how scary and then frustrating it must have been for the coach passengers.) I share your thoughts about the extent of the response by emergency & security organisations to the 999 call and the extraordinary length of time the passengers had to sit as they did on the tarmac. Possible reasons include the organisations using the circumstances as an impromptu opportunity to practice a co-ordinated large scale response. (This happened on a smaller scale several years ago when the emergency services went "way over the top" in response to a rminor spillage of formalin during a science lesson at a school I used to advise.) Also, in view of 1) the considerable extent to which the media were allowed to film the circumstances and 2) the imminence of the London Olympics, it's tempting to suggest that the incident was used to demonstrate to the public - and especially any aspiring terrorists - that the security and emergency services are ready and well prepared for incidents!