Mary Bassett, the city's health commissioner, traveled to Washington on Thursday where she joined the voice with other municipal health chiefs to increase FDA regulation on e-cigarettes. She said the FDA proposed a ban on sale of e-cigarettes last month anyone under 18, which is a good first step, but needs to take more stern measures to bring down the scale of marketing campaigns.

These marketing campaigns to promote e-cigarettes instill a kind of feeling among children and teenagers that smoking is socially acceptable. Also, children often do not have the ability to differentiate between right and wrong and this could lead them to permanent addiction of smoking real cigarettes.

"These are products that are nicotine vehicles, nicotine is a highly addictive substance, delivered in a vapor of unknown composition. It's a basically unregulated industry, and it's being heavily marketed, and marketed to young people", said Bassett.

Marketing campaigns aimed to entice people to start e-cigarettes have been termed as vaping and have strong potential to undermine efforts that have done a significant job to decline smoking rates, especially among young people.

Dr. Jonathan Fielding of the Los Angeles Department of Health said that the FDA intervention is necessary to ensure decades of efforts to de-glamorize smoking are not undone.

The Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) wrote a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, urging that the FDA must take quick actions to address the concern of growing trend of e-cigarettes among youth. A minimum age requirement must be set up to ensure exposure of e-cigarettes to children.

The federal government has imposed bans on marketing of traditional cigarettes, such as banning television ads. But now, there is a need to limit advertising of e-cigarettes and the FDA can do it through its proposed e-cigarette rules.