Category: News This Week

Juul Labs Inc has raised more than $700 million in convertible debt from investors to fund its operations, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, as the e-cigarette maker battles growing regulatory scrutiny on vaping.

Last week, Altria Group Inc said it booked a $4 billion charge in the fourth quarter on its investment in Juul.

The company has recorded $8.6 billion in impairments as of 2019, since it took a 35% stake in Juul for $12.8 billion in December 2018.

The Wall Street Journal had first reported the news, according to Reuters.

The Trump administration has proposed stripping the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of all authority to regulate vapor and tobacco products, according to budget documents released Monday.

Under the budget proposal, a new agency would be created within the Department of Health and Human Services dedicated solely to regulating tobacco, including e-cigarettes, according to an article on statnews.com.

It’s a striking proposal that directly bucks the will of both Congress and the FDA.

The FDA first tried to regulate tobacco products in the 1990s, but that effort was blocked by the Supreme Court. In response, Congress formally gave the FDA power to regulate tobacco in 2009. The agency, however, has faced bipartisan criticism in recent years for its inability to stem the tide of rising youth vaping rates and its related struggle to contain a mysterious vaping-related illness that has killed at least 60, according to the article.

In the budget proposal released Monday, the Trump administration appears to directly criticize the FDA’s progress regulating tobacco. The new tobacco agency would be created “in order to increase direct accountability and more effectively respond to this critical area of public health concern,” the administration writes.

Trump’s budget toes a similar line.

“A new agency with the singular mission on tobacco and its impact on public health would have greater capacity to respond strategically to the growing complexity of new tobacco products,” the budget states. “This reorganization would allow the FDA Commissioner to focus on its traditional mission of ensuring the safety of the Nation’s food and medical products supply.”

Grogan’s comments were widely panned by FDA allies, including former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who said at the time that regulating tobacco was “one of the most productive uses of my time as FDA Commissioner,” the story states.

The proposal is a break from previous Trump budgets, which have called for greater funding of the FDA to tackle the youth vaping epidemic. Last year’s budget called for the FDA to collect $100 million in so-called user fee funds from e-cigarette manufacturers to pay for the FDA’s tobacco work.

The Trump administration would likely need congressional authorization to enact such a sweeping proposal. It’s unclear how Congress will respond to this request, but the president’s budgets are rarely enacted by Congress. Instead, they serve as a blueprint for the president’s policy priorities.

“How Juul hooked a generation on nicotine” was a New York Times headline from 2018 on the new addiction apparently sweeping the youth of the US. It wasn’t the only media outlet to cover the rise in e-cigarettes, as a US government survey from that year showed that vaping among teenagers was on the rise, according to an article on newscientist.com.

But the full figures from this survey have now been newly analysed and they suggest that the original coverage didn’t give the whole picture – in some ways, the results could even be seen as good news for teenagers’ health.

E-cigarettes are meant to be a safer way for people to inhale nicotine without taking in the multiple harmful substances produced by smoking tobacco, like tar and carbon monoxide, the story states.

There have always been worries that, as well as helping smokers quit, they might lure in non-smokers. But in the past few years, concerns have spiralled in the US over small vaping devices branded Juul that deliver a high hit of nicotine, with a choice of flavours.

Alarming headlines
Juul’s purported appeal to teens was highlighted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when it released the 2018 figures. The study was based on its yearly survey of more than 20,000 middle and high-school students and triggered a rash of alarming headlines.

At the time, Juul said it didn’t want young people using its products and stopped selling some of its flavours through retail stores. It has since withdrawn all non-tobacco or menthol flavours from the market, the story states.

But an independent analysis of the full set of those figures, published this week, is more nuanced than those initial headlines. While 14 per cent of the teens surveyed had indeed vaped in the past 30 days, only 4 per cent of the total were regular e-cigarette users, defined as having done so on 20 days or more over that period. Less frequent use suggests “curiosity and experimentation”, says author David Abrams at New York University School of Global Public Health.

We still don’t know whether vaping is safe or not, and the figures suggest that, far from hooking a new generation on nicotine, comparatively few teens who have never smoked take up vaping: less than 1 per cent of those who were vaping regularly had never smoked tobacco before. “There has been a massive focus on teens without making it clear that most of these teens would be smoking anyway,” says Abrams, the story states.

Misguided ban?
But the idea of a new addiction epidemic among the nation’s youth has now taken hold. The US has recently banned all flavours of vapes apart from tobacco and menthol. Yet this could be counterproductive in terms of protecting people’s health. Research suggests that many adults are also keen on sweet-flavoured vapes, including fruit, sweets and desserts, and it can be part of the appeal of switching from smoking to vaping.

Complicating matters is that fears over e-cigarettes have risen after reports last year of a strange lung illness linked with vaping, which has so far caused more than 50 deaths. Further investigation has revealed that these cases actually involved people using black market cannabis vaping liquid that has been bulked up with a harmful additive, vitamin E acetate.

But many media reports have implied that the danger comes from all e-cigarettes, even legal ones that deliver nicotine, which just isn’t true. Yes, we need to make sure that teenagers don’t take up vaping or smoking, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of scaring existing adult smokers from switching to vapes, the story states.

Hawaii could mark another first in the nation by increasing the minimum age to 25 to purchase tobacco and electronic smoking devices.

Nearly four years after the Aloha State banned the sale of such items to those under 21, expanding statewide a law passed in 2014 by the Hawaii County Council that did just that on the Big Island, Rep. Richard Creagan (D-Kona, Ka‘u) is looking to up the age again.

House Bill 2507, co-introduced by Creagan and Rep. John Mizuno, an Oahu Democrat and chairman of the House Committee on Health, would make it illegal to purchase the products by anyone younger than 25.

The proposal cites the harmful effect of nicotine on developing brains, particularly youth and young adults and unborn children, as well as a study by the Institute of Medicine that found raising the minimum purchase age led to decreases in smoking prevalence and mortality.

“The Institute of Medicine noted that increasing the age of purchase of cigarettes to 21 years would reduce the adult smoking prevalence by 12%, and an increase to 25 years, as HB 2507 proposes, would decrease prevalence by 16%, as well as reduce tobacco use by those age 13 to 17 years,” Creagan told the House Committee on Health on Tuesday.

Creagan said the brains of young people, particularly men, continue to develop until at least age 25 and are negatively affected by nicotine, which he called a “potent neurotoxin.” Further, many women have children before age 25, and nicotine is capable of causing similar brain damage to babies as the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which is banned in Hawaii.

Smokers could soon be restricted from lighting up in certain parts of Myrtle Beach. Councilwoman Jackie Hatley said the proposed ban would not include vaping.

Hatley proposed a measure that would prohibit only smoking combustible tobacco products on city-owned facilities, public spaces and the beach. She said it’s time the city transition into the 21st Century by considering the risk secondhand smoke places on residents and tourists, according to a story posted on myrtlebeachonline.com.

“Everybody knows that smoking is bad for you, and inhaling secondhand smoke is bad for you,” Hatley said during City Council’s monthly workshop meeting Thursday afternoon. “This is just a proactive way to protect our adults, children, pets, our citizens and our visitors.”

While there’s currently no ordinance drafted, Myrtle Beach police would be responsible for enforcing the ban, Hatley said, adding those who violate the law would face a fine of up to $100, the story states.