SIMON SANTOW: An Australian coalition of 120 international scientists and health experts have today launched a campaign to convince the World Health Organization to ban the controversial e-cigarettes, or electronic cigarettes.

But the move has not been universally welcomed; it’s also highlighted divisions among anti-tobacco advocates around the globe.

Deborah Cornwall with this report.

WOMAN (excerpt from e-cigarette advertisement): I want you to get it out. I want to see it, feel it, put it in my mouth. I want to see how great it tastes.

If you’re gonna vape, vape with VIP.

DEBORAH CORNWALL: Vaping, it seems, has put the sex back into smoking.

Instead of lighting up, e-cigarette smokers directly inhale the liquid nicotine vapours, delivering the sort of rush that has deeply alarmed anti-tobacco advocates, including professor Renee Bittoun, a global pioneer in tobacco cessation treatments, who’s joined forces with the Australian-led coalition to have e-cigarettes banned completely.

RENEE BITTOUN: I’ve seen some advertising regarding this, pitching towards young, the upwardly mobile. The actual product itself is sleek and slim and beautiful. I would not like to see, freely on the market, a substance that is likened to inhaling crack cocaine and making it readily available to consumers and public. And, to view it otherwise is really naïve.

DEBORAH CORNWALL: As editor of the International Smoking Cessation Journal, Renee Bittoun is right in the middle of the split now dividing public health experts over the potential risks and benefits of e-cigarettes, a market that has emerged in just a few short years into a multibillion dollar industry with growing political clout.

But, while many experts regard e-cigarettes as a new miracle cure for smokers, Professor Renee Bittoun is firmly in the anti camp.

RENEE BITTOUN: This is the cigarette of the 21st Century. How can we possibly imagine we can liberate this? This is really a major retrograde step. It’s a step back into the 1950s.

DEBORAH CORNWALL: You were a maverick; you were one of the global pioneers in the use of nicotine replacement therapy 30 years ago when you were pushing for nicotine gum and patches.

How is this different?

RENEE BITTOUN: It’s very different in as much as we know with nicotine products, these low-dose, slow release nicotine products, the potential is very low to become addicted to them.

There’s not a patch addict on the planet. Nobody gets withdrawals coming off the patches. Do you get withdrawals coming off nicotine electronic devices? You probably do. Because they’re fast deliverers of high dose nicotine.

So, the potential to become addicted to them is rather high.

DEBORAH CORNWALL: We’ve got figures from the UK which show that, just in two years, there are now 2.1 million people smoking e-cigarettes and only about a third of those are ex-smokers, so is it those kind of figures that concern you? That it’s actually more about creating a new market than helping smokers off old school cigarettes?

RENEE BITTOUN: That’s the biggest concern I have. Keep in mind that nicotine from this product, comes from the tobacco industry; their past has been pretty atrocious and why can’t we imagine, until proven otherwise, that this is not going to be the same thing happening over again.

SIMON SANTOW: That was anti-tobacco advocate Professor Renee Bittoun, speaking there with Deborah Cornwall.