By Holly Yeager and Brady Dennis, Published: October 6, The Washington Post

The giants of the tobacco industry know what it’s like to face heavy government regulation. So as the makers of Marlboro, Newport and Camel enter the booming market for electronic cigarettes, they are pressing to keep their new products free of such strict oversight.

With the consumption of e-cigarettes projected by some analysts to surpass that of traditional cigarettes within the next decade, exactly how e-cigarettes are defined — and what kinds of regulations and taxes they will face — are critical to the industry’s future.

At the moment, that future looks very bright, with sales roughly doubling every year and projected to approach $2 billion this year.

The Food and Drug Administration has said it intends to start regulating the sprawling e-cigarette industry for the first time this month, under the 2009 tobacco-control law.

Industry executives have been making their case in high-level meetings at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products in Rockville and with members of Congress who oversee the agency. Their main pitch: The battery-powered devices, which deliver nicotine, flavor and other chemicals in the form of a vapor, are essentially harmless, especially compared with the cancer-causing toxins in regular cigarette smoke, and therefore should get friendlier treatment.

E-cigarette makers large and small also have been lobbying across the country as cities and state legislatures debate how steeply to tax e-cigarettes and where people should be allowed to use them.

Late last month, attorneys general from nearly 40 states wrote to the FDA, urging the agency to treat e-cigarettes like traditional cigarettes and impose restrictions on marketing them to young people. Around the same time, top Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to Margaret Hamburg, head of the FDA, asking that the agency move quickly to regulate e-cigarettes. The letter cited a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said e-cigarette use among middle and high school students has been rising rapidly. The lawmakers also asked the Republican chairman of the committee to schedule a hearing on the health effects of ­e-cigarettes and other tobacco products.

Since September 2012, the FDA’s tobacco center has held at least a dozen ­meetings with representatives of the ­e-cigarette industry, according to agency records and multiple participants. These “listening sessions” have been held at the companies’ request, the FDA said, and those who have participated describe them as a “one-way conversation,” with agency officials providing few clues to their thinking about e-cigarettes.

While e-cigarettes vary from brand to brand, they generally look like cigarettes but do not burn tobacco. Instead, when a user pulls air from the end, an atomizer converts liquid inside the device into a vapor. A starter kit, which typically includes two e-cigarettes, extra batteries and various nicotine cartridges, can cost anywhere from $20 to $200.

Regulators say too little research exists to understand how much nicotine or other potentially harmful chemicals are inhaled during e-cigarette use, or whether they might act as a stepping stone to getting children and nonsmokers hooked on conventional cigarettes. In the meantime, many anti-smoking activists complain that the industry is spending lavishly on advertising to glamorize ­e-cigarettes, potentially undermining decades of work to reduce smoking rates.