Representatives of the U.S. vapor industry expressed mixed feelings at the four-year anniversary of the filing of the first premarket tobacco product applications (PMTAs).
Since the Sept. 9, 2020, deadline, the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) has received applications for 26 million novel tobacco products, mostly electronic cigarettes or e-cigarettes.
However, despite its acknowledgement that e-cigarettes overall are less harmful and less toxic than combustible cigarettes, the agency has rejected more than 99 percent of PMTAs for these products.
At the same time, the FDA has authorized 6,670 new combustible tobacco products to be sold in the U.S., including 3,232 new cigars, 1,291 new pipe tobacco products,1,073 new hookah tobacco products and 973 new cigarettes.
According to the Vapor Technology Association (VTA), current CTP Director Brian King has authorized only four vaping devices as alternatives to cigarettes, compared with 1,270 combustible products.
Director King has justified his refusal to authorize flavored e-cigarettes that are widely used by American adults with the need to protect youth. Yet the most recent National Youth Tobacco Survey revealed that the youth vaping rate—the share of users who say they’ve used an e-cigarettes at least once in the past 30 days—has declined to 5.9 percent, the lowest level in more than a decade.
“Since Sep. 9, 2020, 1.93 million Americans have died from smoking cigarettes (480,000 each year), and approximately 64 million Americans suffered from smoking-related disease (16 million each year), according to the CDC, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. health care system and gross domestic product,” the VTA wrote in a statement.
“In this time, the FDA has only allowed the purveyors of these deadly combustible products to strengthen their grip on the market. Meanwhile, more and more Americans die from smoking, making this anything but a happy anniversary.”