Category: News This Week

KT&G Exporting Heat-Not-Burn Device to Russia

KT&G started exporting its e-cigarette heating devices to Russia last month in accordance with the company’s agreement with Philip Morris International (PMI). The agreement allows the two parties to collaborate on promoting global marketing campaigns, according to a press release.
During a conference call upon the announcement of its second-quarter results, the company confirmed an analyst question that won12.5 billion ($10.54 million) worth of e-cigarette devices were exported to Russia throughout last month. KT&G signed a pact for strategic collaboration with its rival PMI in January, according to a story in The Kores Times.
“It is true that e-cigarette devices were exported last month. We plan to announce further details on the outcome of the PMI deal in the near future,” the company said during the call. The partnership is calling for KT&G to export its “lil” tobacco heating devices and tobacco sticks worldwide through PMI’s global sales network spanning 180 international markets, without specifying which markets the two companies will focus on.
Some questions have persisted over the progress of the deal so far, as no visible outcome has been achieved over the past six months since the agreement was made. However, as exports have now begun, KT&G’s effort to expand its e-cigarette presence is anticipated to pick up momentum.
The export came after heat-not-burn (HNB) tobacco products’ domestic market penetration rate declined for the second consecutive quarter. The rate stood at 13 percent at the end of last year, but declined to 12.6 percent in the first quarter and 12.4 percent in the second quarter. The company, however, said this does not mean a deadlock in HNB products’ growth, citing the expansion in overseas markets.
“From a future business standpoint, the overall heat-not-burn (HNB) tobacco market is expected to grow,” the company said. “When the new products are introduced, the market is bound to grow. While there would be some minor impact from governments’ policies and market events, there is no doubt about the growth trajectory.”
August 6, 2020
Flavour Warehouse Acquires Premier Retail Limited

Credit: Frederick Warren
Flavour Warehouse, parent of the Vampire Vape brand, today announced the acquisition of Premier Retail Limited. The deal is expected to expand Flavour Warehouse’s UK footprint.
Established in 2012, Flavour Warehouse operates in over 80 countries via a network of franchises, distributors and resellers. The acquisition of Premier Vaping strengthens the company’s international expansion and builds on the brand’s growth plans for the future according to a press release.
Premier Vaping, based in Stockport, is part of the Premier Retail Group, established in 2008. The brand has formed distribution partnerships with leading hardware and e-Liquid manufacturers around the world and stocks an extensive range of products in addition to its own brand of E-Liquids, according to the release.
“Premier Vaping is a natural fit for us, due to the brand’s firmly established position in the market and the wide range of products they offer,” said Kanesh Khilosia, director at Flavour Warehouse. “The acquisition of this business is the next step in the development of our extended growth strategy.”
Within the next five years, directors at Flavour Warehouse plan to significantly grow the company via an organic and acquisitive growth strategy, expanding its reach through a multi-channel, global approach.
August 6, 2020
Juul Labs Sues Over Illegal Pod and Device Sales

Photo: Juul Labs
Juul Labs and its Canadian affiliate, Juul Labs Canada, have filed litigation against a global network of entities and individuals that illegally sourced and resold authentic Juul pods and devices worldwide.
Among the main targets of its legal action are the purveyors of the PodVapes and PodMaster websites, entities based in Canada that acquired Juul products from the U.K., Canada and the U.S. to ship all over the world.
PodVapes, for example, acquired authentic Juul pods from Canada and the U.K. in nontobacco and nonmenthol flavors and shipped them into various states in the U.S. to be illegally resold, according to Juul Labs.
“Through investigations, we have confirmed that PodVapes actively sells diverted Juul pod packs into the U.S.,” Juul Labs wrote in a statement. “PodVapes also shipped Juul devices that were explicitly developed for non-U.S. markets into the U.S. in violation of FDA laws and regulations.”
Juul Labs says evidence of this illicit activity first started to emerge in February 2019. While sales of diverted products were first noticed in the markets of New Zealand and Australia by websites facing those countries, the sales quickly spread to websites facing the U.K. and U.S. and, most recently, Canada.
“As Juul Labs continues to reset the category, it is imperative that the company acts as a responsible partner to regulators and other stakeholders around the world, wherever our products are sold,” Juul Labs stated. “We are committed to aggressively going after bad actors in the vapor category and helping to ensure a responsible marketplace for adult smokers seeking legal alternatives to combustible cigarettes.”
August 6, 2020
U.S. FDA Approves CBD Drug for New Seizure Treatment

Credit: GW Pharma
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the cannabidiol (CBD) drug Epidiolex oral solution for the treatment of seizures associated with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) in patients one year of age and older, according to press release from GW Pharma.
TSC is a rare genetic disease that causes non-cancerous tumors to grow in the brain and other parts of the body like the eyes, heart, kidneys, lungs, and skin. TSC affects about 1 in 6,000 people, according to the release.
Epidiolex was previously approved for the treatment of seizures associated with two rare and severe forms of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS) and Dravet syndrome (DS). This is the only FDA-approved drug that contains a purified drug substance derived from cannabis. It is also the second FDA approval of a drug for the treatment of seizures associated with TSC.
Epidiolex’s effectiveness for TSC-associated seizures was established in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial where 148 patients out of 224 received Epidiolex. Patients treated with Epidiolex had a significantly greater reduction in the frequency of seizures during the 16-week treatment period than patients who received placebo.
The most common side effects in Epidiolex-treated patients were: diarrhea, elevated liver enzymes, decreased appetite, sleepiness, fever, and vomiting. The FDA had granted Priority Review designation for this application.
August 5, 2020
Study Finds CBD Industry Will Suffer Major Losses in 2020

Credit: Terre di Cannabis
The economic turmoil cause by the global pandemic will force thousands of cannabidiol (CBD) businesses to close. According to cannabis research firm Brightfield Group, while many industry players will leave, the CBD market will remain flooded with some 1,500 brands jostling for market share, .
The top 20 over-the-counter CBD companies accounted for just 17 percent of the overall CBD market in early 2020, with some 3,000 other competitors crowding 77 percent of the market, the firm estimated in a report released last week.
The largest CBD producer, London’s GW Pharmaceuticals, makes prescription CBD medicines and accounted for the final 6 percent of U.S. CBD sales, according to Brightfield’s count.
The flooded market is a result of entrepreneurial enthusiasm for a booming trend with few established brands, according to an article in hempindustrydaily.com. Throughout 2019, the CBD market saw so many new CBD market participants that those earning less than $1 million in annual revenues occupy over 97 percent of the market, Brightfield concluded.
But the crowd of CBD companies is going to thin substantially in 2020, with COVID-19 driving a likely “extinction event” for half or more of those companies, said Bethany Gomez, managing director of the Florida-based research firm, according to the story.
“A lot of companies that were kind of dabbling in the category have found it to be unsustainable for them,” Gomez said. “A lot of brands that had tried this out, it’s not something that they’ve been able to turn a profit on.”
Not all new CBD startups are discouraged by the flood of competitors. For Jennifer Culpepper, who helped launch CBD skincare line i+i Botanicals in mid-2019, the market was already crowded.
“Our biggest challenge is to find our positioning and where we differentiate ourselves from other brands,” said Culpepper, who is based in Maryland. “How do you differentiate your CBD in a tincture?” she said. “We think of ourselves as a skin-care or self-care company that uses CBD as ingredient. That’s what sets us apart.”
The strategy is proven by Brightfield’s research, which notes that traditional CBD products – tinctures and gummies – are slipping in terms of market share. “The market is no longer entirely dominated by sufferers of extreme pain or epilepsy who must go to great lengths to attain product, nor primarily by cannabis consumers,” Brightfield reported.
Brightfield’s analysis did show some positive signs for CBD makers – notably that sales overall haven’t substantially slipped during the pandemic. The sector’s resilience is especially encouraging given national uncertainty about the economy and the level of unemployment enhancements the federal government stopped paying last week, Gomez said.
August 4, 2020
Massachusetts Releases Quarantined Cannabis Vapes

Credit: Add Weed
Last September, Massachusetts became the first state to ban sales of all vaping products, for both tobacco and cannabis, in response to a mysterious vaping-related lung illness known as e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury (EVALI). In November, the state’s Cannabis Control Commission ordered a quarantine on all cannabis vaping products, except for products for flower used by medical cannabis patients.
That quarantine is being lifted, releasing more than 600,000 vaping products manufactured before December 12, 2019, which is when the Commission allowed for new cannabis vaping products to be sold, according to ap press release. The Commission announced Monday that “licensees may retest and release—or destroy—certain products with enhanced warning labels,” under certain conditions.
“Since the Commonwealth declared a vaping public health emergency last fall, the Commission has dedicated significant energy and resources to investigating the additives, hardware, and storage practices that licensees use to produce and sell cannabis vaporizer products,” Shawn Collins, the executive director of the Commission, said in the announcement. “Fortunately, repeat tests of licensed product samples did not return any detectable levels of [vitamin E acetate]; unfortunately, they did establish that heavy metal contamination may increase in vaping products over time.”
Vitamin E acetate became the primary culprit in the investigations into the vaping-related illnesses by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cannabis licensees have three options when it comes to their vaping products: dispose; retest and release; or reclaim, meaning, “repurposed into other products,” which would also require retesting. Re-released products must have a label indicating that they “passed retesting for heavy metals and Vitamin E Acetate,” and that they, or their contents, were “previously quarantined.”
August 4, 2020
NIH Grants $2.3 Million for Study on Vaping Pregnant

Credit: National Cancer Institute
Studies have shown that pregnant women who smoke increase the risk of their children having asthma, and that those children—even if non-smokers—can pass it on to their own children.
There have been few objective studies that evaluated the effects of vaping nicotine while pregnant. This week, investigators from The Lundquist Institute (LI) received a $2.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to research the multi-generational effect of vaping, or smoking an electronic cigarette, while pregnant.
Using established models for the study, investigators will determine whether e-cigarette vapor increases the risk of asthma in the offspring of pregnant mice. They will go on to test whether those offspring, who will not be exposed to e-cigarettes, bear an increased risk of giving birth to offspring with asthma, according to a press release.
The study will also assess the effects of nicotine and e-cigarette flavorings on viability and the epigenetic memory of germ cells, seeking to determine how these new flavoring technologies affect cells.
August 4, 2020
U.K. Group Campaigning Against Underage Access

Photo: VPZ
The U.K. Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) has teamed up with Trading Standards to prevent the underage sales of vapor products across the country.
With the support of Buckinghamshire & Surrey Trading Standards, the association has published the Preventing Underage Sales Guide—the first of its kind published by the U.K. vapor industry.
John Dunne
The guide covers current vaping age legislation in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; use and best practice enforcement of the Challenge 25 rule; and dealing with the issue of proxy purchasing where an adult buys on behalf of someone under 18. It also advises on different forms of ID that can be accepted and methods of deception to be aware of as well as points to consider with digital age verification.
“The legal age to buy vaping products is 18, and we want to keep it that way by making it as hard as possible for minors to get their hands on vaping devices and e-liquids,” said John Dunne, director at the UKVIA. “This guide is designed to ensure consistency and high-level standards across the industry when it comes to age verification.”
August 4, 2020
UK Vaping Retailer Opens First Store Since Lockdown

VPZ opened a new store on July 31, its first since Covid-19 lockdowns began. The UK’s largest vaping retailer opened the shop in Bruntsfield, Edinburgh, creating five new jobs.
Headquartered in Newbridge, Edinburgh, VPZ director Doug Mutter said the company has had to adapt to the new way of life following the huge change in the retail landscape.
“We are seeing the biggest change in the retail economy in living memory and we as a company have had to be adapt in what we can offer. We understand that not all of our customers are able to travel to our stores. The High Street is having to adapt to much smaller footfall,” he stated in a release. “That is why we have opened this new store within a more residential area to ensure we can still serve our customers, without requiring them to take excessive travel. We believe this maybe a longer-term change to the marketplace and we are investing and committing to serving local communities as best we can.”
Despite the retail sector facing huge challenges the company are seeing more smokers making the switch, with record numbers of quit attempts in 2020.
“Vaping represents a huge public health opportunity and the market will continue to grow as increasing numbers of smokers recognise its effectiveness in helping people to quit smoking,” stated Mutter. “Consumer education is crucial too and our knowledgeable staff are always available with advice and support that helps make it easy for smokers to make the switch and give up cigarettes once and for all.”
August 3, 2020
U.S. House Votes to Protect States With Legal Marijuana

Credit: Louis Velazquez
An amendment to protect all U.S. state-run marijuana programs from federal interference passed the U.S. he House of Representatives on Thursday. The bill passed in a 254-163 vote on the floor. Earlier in the day, it had been approved in an initial voice vote.
If enacted, the measure would prevent the Department of Justice (DOJ) from using its funds to impede states from implementing cannabis legalization laws. The bipartisan effort was led by Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Tom McClintock, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Barbara Lee.
The amendment builds on an existing provision that only protects state medical cannabis laws from DOJ intervention that has been enacted through appropriations legislation each year since 2014.
As a growing number of states have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational purposes, “we’ve watched across the country shifting attitudes,” Blumenauer said in the floor debate prior to the vote, according to marijuanamoment.net, a cannabis advocacy group. “The federal government, sadly, is still trapped by the dead hand of Richard Nixon’s war on drugs, declaring cannabis a schedule I controlled substance.”
The congressman also talked about separate House-passed legislation to protect banks that service the marijuana industry and another standalone bill to federally deschedule cannabis.
July 31, 2020