Category: News This Week

California is suing Juul Labs for marketing its products directly to underage teenagers and failing to include health warnings.

Announced on Monday by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the lawsuit alleges that the San Francisco company contributed to a public health epidemic by selling tobacco products directly to minors. The suit also accuses Juul Labs of violating the privacy of minors by sending marketing emails to those who failed the age verification on Juul Labs’ website.

The suit also alleges that Juul Labs neglected to inform consumers about health risks associated with the product, such as chemicals linked to cancer and the potential for reproductive harm.

“Juul adopted the tobacco industry’s infamous playbook, employing advertisements that had no regard for public health and searching out vulnerable targets,” Becerra said in a press release.

Since Juul’s launch in 2015, youth vaping in the United States has almost doubled, according to a press statement published by the California Department of Justice. From 2017 to 2019, e-cigarette use among high school students rose by 135 percent. The majority of underage e-cigarette users report that Juul is their usual brand.

A spokesperson for Juul Labs said the company is “focused on resetting the vapor category in the U.S. and earning the trust of society by working cooperatively with attorneys general, regulators, public health officials and other stakeholders to combat underage use and convert adult smokers from combustible cigarettes.”

Just two weeks ago, President Donald Trump had a plan in place to ban most flavored e-cigarettes on the US market. Then, suddenly, those plans changed.

For nearly two months, momentum had been building inside the White House to try to halt a youth vaping epidemic that experts feared was hurting as many as 5 million teenagers, according to an article by the Associated Press.

Both first lady Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, pushed for the ban, which was also being championed internally by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who has taken the lead on some public health issues.

But as Trump listened to his political advisers, he grew reluctant to sign the ban, convinced it could alienate voters who would be financially or otherwise affected by a vaping ban, according to two White House and campaign officials not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

A news conference scheduled by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to announce the ban was canceled, while more meetings with industry leaders and lobbyists were proposed, according to the officials.

Trump tweeted last week that he’ll be meeting with vaping industry representatives, medical professionals and others “to come up with an acceptable solution to the vaping and e-cigarette dilemma.” The White House has yet to announce a date for a meeting.

This month, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and others showed the president polling data indicating that e-cigarette users could abandon him if he followed through with the ban, the officials said, according to the article.

Campaign aides also highlighted an aggressive social media campaign — #IVapeIVote — in which advocates claimed a ban would force the closure of vaping shops, eliminating jobs and sending users of electronic cigarettes back to traditional smokes. Parscale also pointed out the risk that a ban could have on e-cigarette users in key battleground states that Trump narrowly won in 2016.

Others in the West Wing, including Conway, have argued that a ban could be a winning issue with suburban voters, including mothers, who have fled the president in large numbers. Few would predict where Trump, who is known to abruptly change his mind, would end up since he recently has been consumed with other matters, notably televised impeachments hearings, according to the article.

Turning Point Brands has promoted Graham A. Purdy to chief operating officer.

Since joining the company in 2004, Purdy has held a range of leadership positions. Among other accomplishments, he built and ran the company’s sales organization, launched the Nu-X new product development engine and led transaction teams for many of the company’s strategic initiatives.

In his new role as chief operating officer, Purdy will oversee the day-to-day operations of the business.

“I have worked with Graham for the past 15 years. He has great intuition for the consumer, anticipates new market trends and builds strong internal processes to capitalize on those growth opportunities,” said Larry Wexler, president and chief executive of Turning Point Brands.

“I am eager and excited to help build upon the company’s legacy of success,” said Purdy. “Moving forward, we intend to accelerate the momentum behind our Stoker’s MST brand, broaden the iconic ZIG-ZAG portfolio and provide adult consumers with a broad range of exciting new products in the burgeoning actives market.”

A2LA has renewed accreditation of Global Laboratory Services (GLS) to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 for cannabis testing. Based in Wilson, North Carolina, USA, GLS is the first cannabis testing laboratory accredited in the state.

ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation confirms that laboratories have management, quality and technical systems in place to ensure accurate and reliable analyses as well as proper administrative processes to ensure that all aspects related to the sample, the analysis and the reporting are standardized, measured and monitored.

“At Global Laboratory Services, we always strive to keep pace with industry needs,” said Kim Hesse, business development manager at GLS. “We saw the need for an accredited laboratory in the hemp industry and therefore added CBD and THC testing to our scope. Our next step is to expand our service offerings to include agrochemical analysis of industrial hemp.”

A2LA is an independent nonprofit accreditation body in the United States.

An 18-year-old has become the first person to die of vaping in Belgium after authorities blamed his respiratory failure on e-cigarette use, according to a report in The Brussels Times.

The vaper, who lived in Brussels, died on Nov. 6 after using a device with cannabidiol (CBD), a popular and legal hemp component with mild soothing properties that is also sold on the black market mixed with illicit and dangerous products.

“The link with the electronic cigarette is established,” said Health Minister Maggie De Block when questioned in Belgian parliament. “There is no other explanation for such severe pneumonia in this patient.”

The case follows an outbreak of vaping-related hospitalizations and deaths in the United States that have been mostly blamed on vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent in vaping oil.

Apple has removed 181 vaping-related apps from its app store, citing health concerns, reports CNN.

“Recently, experts ranging from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to the American Heart Association have attributed a variety of lung injuries and fatalities to e-cigarette and vaping products, going so far as to call the spread of these devices a public health crisis and a youth epidemic. We agree, and we’ve updated our app store review guidelines to reflect that apps encouraging or facilitating the use of these products are not permitted,” the company said in a statement.

Apple said the apps are a mix of stores, social networks, news and games and represent 0.00010 percent of the 1.8 million apps available through the app store.

The apps now banned from the app store will continue to work for customers who already have them downloaded on their devices, and they can be transferred to new devices.

Apple’s move was applauded by groups such as the American Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

In its annual study released on Nov. 14, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the U.S. adult smoking prevalence rate for 2018 was 13.7 percent or 34.2 million people, slightly down from 2017.

The U.S. adult e-cigarette prevalence rate for 2018 was 3.2 percent, up from 2.8 percent in 2017. Brian King, deputy director for research translation in the CDC’s office on smoking and health, noted that young adults spurred the increase as 7.6 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 24 vape.

“What we don’t want to be doing is playing a game of public health whack-a-mole where we let the use of some products go up while others go down, particularly among the young adult population,” said King.

U.S. health officials have found vitamin E acetate in the lung fluids of 29 people sickened in the recent outbreak of vaping-related injuries, according to reports by The Washington Post, Reuters and other sources.

Described as a “breakthrough,” the discovery points to the oil as a likely culprit in the outbreak that has affected more than 2,000 people and killed at least 39.

The findings are significant because for the first time, scientists have been able to connect results from product testing with clinical specimens from patients.

“These findings provide direct evidence of vitamin E acetate at the primary site of injury within the lungs,” said Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Significantly, no other potential toxins were detected, according to Schuchat. The CDC tested for a wide range of substances in patients’ lung fluids, including plant oils and petroleum distillates, such as mineral oil.

Vitamin E acetate has been used in recent months as a cutting agent or additive on the cannabis black market to stretch the amount of THC in vape cartridges, officials and industry experts have said. Vitamin E acetate is a popular additive because it is colorless and odorless, has similar viscosity to THC oil and is much cheaper.

CDC officials found THC in the lung fluids of 23 patients, including three who said they had not used THC products.

Used in many foods and in cosmetics, vitamin E acetate is not known to cause harm when swallowed or applied to the skin. But when it is heated and inhaled, it may interfere with normal lung function, causing symptoms similar to those described by the patients suffering from vaping illness, according to experts.

As of Nov. 5, 2,051 cases of vaping-associated lung injury and 39 deaths had been reported to the CDC.

San Francisco’s upcoming ban on the sale of e-cigarettes will remain in place, as voters soundly rejected a ballot measure Tuesday that would have overturned the prohibition approved by the Board of Supervisors in June. The city will still allow sales of combustible cigarettes.

According to a story posted on sfchronicle.com, Proposition C was losing by 4-1. The measure would have allowed the sale of vaping devices and nicotine cartridges with some new restrictions. It would have limited the number of vaping products a person could buy to two devices and five packs of cartridges per transaction in brick-and-mortar stores, and two devices and 60 milliliters of nicotine liquid each month online.

The measure also would have required online sellers to apply for a permit, similar to what brick-and-mortar stores must do.

The regulations would have taken the place of the outright sales ban on e-cigarettes that supervisors approved to combat the rise in teen vaping. The legislation, slated to take effect in January, suspends the sale of e-cigarettes that have not passed a Food and Drug Administration review — which includes all e-cigarettes now on the market. But the ban may not be permanent; it would be lifted for any e-cigarettes that eventually pass FDA review.

Prop. C — dubbed “An Act to Prevent Youth Use of Vapor Products” — was this election’s big-ticket item from the start. It was sponsored by the San Francisco vaping company Juul, in an attempt to stave off the ordinance that would prohibit the company from selling its products in its own hometown.

Germany’s new drug commissioner, Daniela Ludwig, has called for restrictions on outdoor tobacco and e-cigarette advertising.

While fewer Germans use cigarettes, vaping is becoming far more popular, especially among young people, according to the 2019 national drug and addiction report

“We’re seeing that the use of e-cigarettes is clearly increasing, especially among teenagers and young adults,” Ludwig said. “This trend has to be stopped.”

Ludwig stressed that there needed to be a bigger push to help people with addictions as well as a more open dialogue about drug policy rather than “ideology-based debates.”