Vaping battle heats up as FDA deadline looms

Date:

Robert Arnold has spent years building his company, Saffire Vapor, which cranks out 5,000 bottles of nicotine e-liquid a 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, 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 flavors 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 like 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.”

Advocates for and against vaping are gearing up for a rerun of last fall’s fight over a proposed federal ban on flavored 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 U.S. market for e-cigarettes, the credibility of the agency and whether vaping re-emerges as a political issue during this presidential election year.

Read full article here.

Laurie McGinley – Washington Post – February 24, 2020.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Nicotine DOESNT Cause diseases or lung it’s the tar and other chemicals. EVERY Case of vaping related lung injury has involved THC (psychoactive component in marijuana) with lipids including Vit E acetate from street dealers. Lipids are lung suicide and accumulate like grease in a coffee can with no escape
    E-cigarettes are NOT a teen gateway to tobacco-the exact opposite. 50, 000 people in Britain have quit smoking in 2019. The government and hospitals are encouraging e-cigarettes. eg- Largest hospital in England is giving away e-cigarettes to patients, two others have opened vape shops and they all allow it indoors. The Royal College of Physicians-first to report with more accuracy and information against tobacco before the U.S. Surgeon General state that the TOTAL vaping risk is 1-5 percent of tobacco. Why haven’t they had any of the problems we do? Anyone with teenagers have much bigger drug problems to worry about. Spice or Crack anyone?

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