Category: News This Week

The US city of Dayton, Ohio has said it will not hire employees who use any nicotine products in a bid to create a healthier workplace, cut back on medical costs and reduce the ‘loss of productivity’ from smoke breaks. 

The city will enforce the new rule with all employees hired after from July on but it won’t apply to employees who worked for the city’s office beforehand, according to a story in dailymail.co.uk. 

The city will employ a nicotine and tobacco pre-employment screening process. After being hired, the city will test employees if the office is tipped off about their tobacco use, according to the story.

‘Studies indicate that employees that smoke cost approximately an additional $6,000 per year in direct medical costs and lost productivity,’ Kenneth Couch, Dayton’s director of human resources, said. 

Under the new rule employees will be banned from using nicotine or tobacco products at work or in their time off. The new plan will also eliminate designated smoking areas around the city property, according to the story. 

However, not everyone is on board. 

Leaders of labor unions fear that the new city policy could be a ‘slippery slope’ that could further scrutinize the personal habits of employees and their private lives that have little correlation with their job performance. 

In what seems to be growing problem, police took down a group of men selling fake vapor products.

Officials raided a home on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac just off busy Jerusalem Avenue in East Meadow on Friday, according to a story on CBS New York’s website. They confiscated millions in cash and counterfeit vaping products.

“They, like, had deliveries. I saw, like, cars coming, bringing boxes,” neighbor Lucy Silva said, according to the story.

“They just seemed like a very nice family. They pretty much keep to themselves,” neighbor Peter Morra told CBS2’s Jennifer McLogan.

Fifty-eight-year-old Ali Asghar and his two sons, 33-year-old Ali Zar and 35-year-old Ali Moosa, have all been charged with trademark counterfeiting. The feds and Nassau Police report they got wind of the operation in January at Kennedy Airport.

“A shipment coming from China was identified as belonging to Mr. Asghar,” Frank Russo, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said, according to the story.

“Approximately $4 million dollars of sales that were generated. They advertised on social media,” Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said, according to the story. The counterfeit products were also sold in stores owned by the suspects in East Meadow, Levittown, Bellerose and Commack.

Juul has launched the first in a series of bluetooth-connected e-cigarettes that can monitor users’ vaping and track their devices. The Juul C1, as the device is known, started selling in the United Kingdom this week after a successful pilot in Canada.

Dan Thomson, managing director of Juul’s U.K. business, said that in order to use the device, which is linked to an app on users’ smartphones, customers had to go through stringent age verification checks that included facial recognition and two-step background check with third-party databases.

Juul’s C1 device will allow users to monitor how many puffs they take a day, as well as locate their vape if they lose it. It also has an auto-lock option that means the e-cigarette can be locked when out of the phone’s range in order to prevent others using it.

However, privacy experts have raised concerns about the gathering of data required to develop the device.

“Data about the machine that goes back to the manufacturer can tell you a lot about the user and who that user is,” said Martin Garner, COO of the technology consultancy CCS Insight. “The main risk is if that data gets out . . . you could identify the person from it . . . and that it could be health-related information, which is a super sensitive area in GDPR [the EU General Data Protection Regulation].”

With the next wave of cannabis legalization looming, the business of pot is once again the business of mergers and acquisitions. If the last phase was all about production and distribution, this phase may be dominated by technology, according to a story posted on cbc.ca.

Specifically, vape pens.

They’re among a series of new products, including edibles, beverages and extracts, that will be for sale legally in Canada in mid-December.

Which explains why Canadian cannabis company Auxly Cannabis Group Inc. has teamed up with British tobacco giant Imperial Brands in a deal worth more than $120 million. Imperial gets a foothold in the cannabis market and Auxly gets exclusive access to Imperial’s vape IP, technology and research.

The partnership “accelerates Auxly’s plan to go heavily into the recreational market,” said Auxly CEO Chuck Rifici. “Particularly, the vape category, which we think will be very large.”

In fact, analysts say vaping could become the driving force of the recreational cannabis market.

Chris Damas, editor of the BCMI Cannabis Report says of all the new products coming on line, from vape products to edibles and everything in between, vape pens will make up half of all derivative sales.

The Bombay High Court in India on Friday stayed the State government’s action against vapor products and said it will now determine whether e-cigarettes fall under the definition of drugs.

A Division Bench of Justices Ranjit More and Bharati Dangre was hearing a petition filed by e-cigarette manufacturer Godfrey Philips India Ltd. and its director Sharad Aggarwal, challenging a notice issued on July 6, 2019, by the Drug Inspector (Greater Mumbai), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to an article posted on thehindi.com.

The notice followed an inspection of the stock of e-cigarettes, and the FDA claimed it was banned in Maharashtra.

The petitioners said the Delhi High Court had stayed the circular issued by the State banning e-cigarettes. Senior counsel Amit Desai said the petitioners are entitled to similar relief and the stock that has been seized needs to be released, according to the story.

The court directed the Centre to spell out its stand on whether e-cigarettes was a drug and hence banned.

Phillip Morris International (PMI) is lobbying the Thai government to reverse a ban on smoking alternatives, such as e-cigarettes and heat-not-burn tobacco products, reports The Bangkok Post.

According to Phillip Morris Thailand’s managing director, Gerald Margolis, the company has met with the ministry of commerce and the excise department and has sent numerous scientific studies on the health advantages of smoke-free alternatives to the ministry of public health.

“We will continue to present fact-based, non-ideological studies and results from other countries with the government,” Margolis said. “It would be silly to make an electric vehicle regulation without consulting automotive manufacturers, so there should be dialogue with the tobacco industry when crafting tobacco regulation.”

There are 10.7 million smokers in Thailand as of 2017 (19.1 percent of the country) and despite a variety of anti-smoking regulations, the number of smokers has only dropped 4 percent in the past 13 years, or 0.3 percent per year. Thailand is one of the most restrictive markets for cigarettes, with bans on marketing and in-store displays, as well as plans to introduce plain, non-branded, packaging by the end of the year.

Juul co-founder James Monsees testified before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee last week and said his company never intended its electronic cigarettes to be adopted by underage teenagers.

“Juul Labs isn’t big tobacco,” Monsees told the House subcommittee, adding that “combating underage use” is the company’s highest priority.

The two hearings convened last week after launching an investigation last month into Juul’s marketing, technology and business practices.

During his testimony, Monsees reiterated past steps taken by Juul, including shutting down its Facebook and Instagram pages and pulling several of its flavored pods out of retail stores to keep Juul out of the hands of teens. Monsees said he understands the negative scrutiny of his company, but assured lawmakers Juul’s aim is to “eliminate cigarettes for good.”

One of the top scientists behind electronic cigarette leader Juul Labs Inc. is striking out on her own to launch a new e-cigarette brand in China, according to a story in Bloomburg news.

Chenyue Xing’s company, Myst Labs, has developed a slick silver device called the Myst P Series that will debut at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Guangzhou on Saturday, according to the story. Resembling a USB flash drive, the 399 RMB ($58) e-cigarette was designed to solve some of the challenges facing Juul, which is under fire in the U.S. for high-nicotine products critics say encouraged addiction among millions of non-smokers, many of them minors.

“Juul’s technology is now three years old. I don’t think it’s made any other innovation on the liquid formulation since they launched,” says Xing, who co-invented the nicotine salt technology behind Juul’s e-cigarettes before leaving the startup in 2016, according to the story. “There’s much more to be done, especially in China where there’s hundreds of millions of smokers who we could help to eventually quit smoking.”

Xing, Myst’s chief scientist and co-founder, says the P Series has lower nicotine levels than Juul products and was formulated to appeal to current smokers — avoiding the fruity flavors that might lure in teenage newbies. Myst plans to avoid social media advertising and will deploy facial recognition software in retail stores and online sellers to help ensure minors don’t buy its products. Juul didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Just like kids who drink beer are turned off by the taste, we’re looking to create a nicotine formulation that kids won’t like and only veteran smokers will enjoy,” Xing says, according to the story.

Xing, 37, grew up in Shanghai and moved to the U.S. to study. She got a Ph.D in chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis, and worked at U.S. biotech and pharmaceutical companies, specializing in orally-inhaled drugs for diseases like asthma, according to the story. She says she went to work for Juul to help people stop smoking but left when the parent company expanded its focus to offer marijuana vaporizers. Now, she wants to build an e-cig leader like Juul for her home country.

She started Myst this year with co-founder Thomas Yao, who is also a founding partner at IMO Ventures, a venture firm focused on early stage investments in Asian startups that want to bring their technology to the U.S. or Europe, or vice versa, according to the story. In addition to scooter startup Lime, his firm was also an early investor in Indian digital wallet Paytm, which is now backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and SoftBank Group Corp.

Myst’s two dozen employees are split between Silicon Valley, where scientists work on research, and Shenzhen, where the manufacturing and marketing staffs make and sell the devices. The company declined to disclose how much money it has raised so far, but Yao says it has “more than enough funding to get us to profitability.”

Myst faces intense competition in China, where dozens of e-cigarette startups have collectively raised tens of millions of dollars in an attempt to profit from the world’s largest tobacco market, according to the story. The e-cigarette craze has hit as overall funding for tech startups has slowed in China, with venture deals dropping 77% in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to market research firm Preqin.

“This initial land grab is so important,” said veteran angel investor Rui Ma. “For tobacco and other hedonistic products, most people are loyal to one brand.”

RELX, a startup co-founded by a former Uber China executive, has already raised funds from investors including Source Code Capital, IDG Capital and Hike Capital. Startup Moti Technology, which operates in Las Vegas and Shenzhen, has said it raised more than $30 million from investors, including ZhenFund, and plans to generate $120 million in annual sales. Juul itself is also said to have ambitions to enter the Chinese market.

The global e-vapor market grew to $15.8 billion in 2018 from $3.7 billion in 2013, according to Euromonitor International. China represented only $750 million of that market last year, according to the story. Despite the rapid growth of e-cigarettes in the U.S., it’s still uncommon to see them in the hands of China’s 350 million smokers.

A new study from the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Tobacco Research and Treatment Center found evidence demonstrating that using e-cigarettes daily helps U.S. smokers quit smoking combustible cigarettes.

Using data from more than 8,000 adult smokers, the investigators measured how likely a smoker was to quit smoking and remain off combustible cigarettes, comparing daily and non-daily e-cigarette users with those who only smoked combustible cigarettes.

They found that smokers who used e-cigarettes every day, compared with e-cigarette nonusers, were more likely to quit combustible cigarettes within one year and to stay off them for at least another year. They also found that smokers who used e-cigarettes were no more likely to relapse back to smoking combustible cigarettes than smokers not using e-cigarettes.

“This finding suggests that smokers who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking need to use them regularly—every day—for these products to be most helpful,” said the study’s lead author, Sara Kalkhoran.

Schlesinger Law Firm has filed a motion for preliminary injunction asking a U.S. federal court in Florida to ban the sale of Juul electronic cigarettes across the United States. The firm says it wants halt “an epidemic of youth nicotine addiction that has surged due to the skyrocketing growth of Juul.”

Juul and other e-cigarette makers have not applied for or received FDA premarket authorization to sell their electronic nicotine devices, as required under the Tobacco Control Act.

“Under the law, companies must have regulatory permission before they can sell new tobacco products in the public space,” said Scott P. Schlesinger, an attorney at Schlesinger Law Offices in Fort Lauderdale.

“In 2017, the FDA granted makers of e-cigarettes a five-year extension to file for approval. Since then, sales of the product have exploded and created an epidemic.”

A federal judge in Maryland recently ordered the FDA to shorten that time “but that relief is insufficient to end the dramatic increase of nicotine addiction among youth,” says Schlesinger.

Citing independent research, the FDA says that 3.62 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes in 2018. E-cigarette use jumped 78 percent among high school students from 2017 to 2018 and 48 percent among middle school students during the same time period.

“The motion to enjoin Juul from selling its products seeks only to treat the company as it should have been all along,” said Jonathan R. Gdanski, an attorney at Schlesinger. “You don’t get to sell a tobacco product, take over the marketplace and then ask for permission for that product after it is engrained in society.”

The FDA says that five brands, including Juul, control 97 percent of the U.S. market for e-cigarettes. Juul had 72 percent of the market in August, according to Nielsen. The company has forecast $3.4 billion in revenue this year, triple that in 2018.

In April, Schlesinger Law Firm filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of a Sarasota County teenager, age 15, and her parents against Juul Labs and Altria Group, which owns Philip Morris USA, which claims in part that the plaintiff is addicted to the nicotine in Juul e-cigarettes. Altria holds a 35 percent interest in Juul.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, seek damages under the RICO Act and for fraud, product liability and deceptive trade practices. It says that Juul and Altria/Philip Morris are violating federal racketeering laws by intentionally exploiting adolescents while falsely denying they are doing so.

According to Jeffrey Haberman, an attorney at Schlesinger Law Offices, “Juul knew that its e-cigarettes were unsafe for non-smokers and that the product posed a risk of aggravating addiction in those addicted to cigarettes.”