Vaping battle heats up as US deadline looms
MAY 12 DEADLINE TO PROVE ITS PUBLIC HEALTH BENEFITS
Robert Arnold has spent years building his company, Saffire Vapor, which cranks out 5,000 bottles of nicotine e-liquid per week, including Red October (banana nut bread and strawberries), Naughty or Nice (sugar cookie) and Engineer (buttery cinnamon toast). He sells the “vape juice”, worth about $65,000 (Dh238,712), at his 24 vape shops in Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as online.
But now, Arnold is worried he might lose everything.
By May 12, for the first time ever, vaping manufacturers must file applications to the Food and Drug Administration proving their products benefit public health — or risk having them yanked from the market.
Arnold says he can’t afford the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars he figures it would cost to do the exhaustive applications for his products, which come in 128 flavours and multiple nicotine strengths. But he can’t afford trouble with the FDA either.
Get ready for Round Two of the vaping wars. For public health groups, May 12 represents a milestone in the FDA’s sluggish, long-overdue effort to regulate e-cigarettes. For small companies such as Arnold’s, the deadline looms as an existential threat. “Is this going to destroy me?” Arnold wondered aloud recently. “I’m losing a lot of sleep over it.”
Federal ban
Advocates for and against vaping are gearing up for a rerun of last fall’s fight over a proposed federal ban on flavoured e-cigarettes. The vape shops and their e-liquid suppliers largely won that one. But the new dispute over how forcefully the FDA will enforce the May 12 deadline carries even higher stakes: It could determine the US market for e-cigarettes, the credibility of the agency and whether vaping re-emerges as a political issue during this presidential election year.
Small manufacturers such as Arnold want the May mandate postponed or softened. They insist that they cater to adults trying to quit smoking and should be treated differently than big e-cigarette companies such as Juul Labs, which popularised the sleek, cartridge-based vapes embraced by teens.
Without a rollback, there will likely be “13,000 small businesses on the chopping block,” in the middle of 2020, primarily small to medium eliquid makers and their vape shop customers, warned Tony Abboud, executive director of the Vapor Technology Association.