Battle brewing over ban on flavored vaping
Supporters of a proposal to ban the sale of flavored vaping products in Connecticut said they are preparing to fight efforts by Big Tobacco to riddle the bill with loopholes and exemptions.
For several years, lawmakers in the General Assembly have sought to prohibit the sale e-cigarettes, the most used tobacco product by youth. This year’s proposal would follow flavored vape bans enacted in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, which include menthol-flavored e-cigarettes.
The Public Health Committee voted last month to advance the bill, which the Finance, Revenue & Bonding Committee, is now expected to take up given its $2 million fiscal note.
“If history is any record, the industry is actively working the finance committee to try to make this policy completely ineffective in terms of keeping these products away from Connecticut’s kids,” said Kevin O’Flaherty, director of advocacy for Connecticut Campaign Tobacco-Free Kids, a major advocate for the ban.
Rep. Holly Cheeseman, R-East Lyme, a top Republican on the committee, said she had not yet been lobbied on the vape issue. Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, cochairman of the finance committee, said he expects “there will be intense lobbying” by the industry once the bill is referred to the committee and placed on its calendar.
“I think a majority of my committee, including me, wants to get something done, in line with what other states around us have done,” Scanlon said outside the House chamber Wednesday.
Fellow committee cochair, Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, said he is “a vehement anti-smoker,” but is sympathetic to adults who use vaping to stop smoking traditional cigarettes. Fonfara said he’s also concerned about reports he’s read regarding “a growing black market” in Massachusetts following that state’s flavored vape ban.
“I don’t want to discourage it for people who legitimately are using it to get off of (cigarettes), and not go into the black market to get it,” Fonfara said Wednesday at the state Capitol when asked about his support for the ban. “I haven’t personally made a decision, but that’s the information I’m reading and learning about.”
The president of the American Vaping Association, Gregory Conley raised similar concerns when testifying against the bill during a public hearing last month.
“Removing flavored vaping products from the market will lead to increases in black market activity and decreases in adults quitting smoking,” Conley testified. “Black market concerns cannot be adequately addressed by simply going after ‘bad actors’ using traditional e-commerce retailers, as anecdotal data suggests that following flavor bans, sales from informal dealers boom on platforms like TikTok (who use personal payment systems like CashApp or Venmo instead of merchant accounts).”
Last year, the finance committee considered a ban on all flavored tobacco products. But O’Flaherty said that bill failed to garner support largely due to the $130 million in sales tax revenue the state would’ve lost annually.
Instead, the committee advanced a bill to prohibit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, but “carved out exemptions” that would’ve benefited the industry, O’Flaherty. The changes rendered the bill “worthless,” he said, and led to calls from anti-vape supporters to kill it.
“We’re already hearing talk in terms of their lobbyists talking to legislators about trying to cut a deal, trying to add exemptions to it,” O’Flaherty said of the industry’s efforts to kill this year’s bill.
The industry has lobbied to exempt menthol flavored vaping products from the ban and to exempt vape products that received a so-called Premarket Tobacco Product Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.— an issue the main supporter of New York’s vaping ban warned about in a recent op-ed in the Connecticut Post.
O’Flaherty said the FDA’s inaction to regulate vaping products is largely to blame for the youth e-cigarette epidemic, so to let the agency “usurp Connecticut’s power to say ‘We don’t want these products here for our kids,’ it just doesn’t make any sense.”