A recently proposed ban on vaping flavors in the Netherlands will endanger public health, according to the Independent European Vape Alliance (IEVA).
Around 65 percent of adult vapers in Europe use fruit or sweet liquids. According to the IEVA, the variety of flavors is one of the most important reasons for smokers to switch to e-cigarettes and for vapers not to go back to smoking.
Ignoring this fact, the Dutch State Secretary Paul Blokhuis announced a ban on all e-cigarette flavours except tobacco flavors in the Netherlands, to discourage youth smoking.
“This measure risks very negative consequences for public health and tobacco harm reduction,” the IEVA wrote in a statement. “With only tobacco flavors left, vapers’ threshold to relapse on tobacco smoking dangerously lowers.”
A public consultation on the plan will run until Jan.19, 2021. The vast majority of the comments so far come from vapers and scientists who reject the government’s plan.
According to the IEVA, the Dutch plan ignores important facts:
The number of young people in the Netherlands who have ever tried e-cigarettes has decreased by a quarter in the past five years.
Only 0.2 percent of 14-16 olds in the Netherlands vaped regularly in 2019.
8 percent of all Dutch users of e-cigarettes come from smoking.
“Removing flavours will not affect the rates of youth cigarette use,” said Riccardo Polosa, professor of internal medicine and specialist of respiratory diseases and clinical immunology at the University of Catania. “But, it will certainly reduce the number of options available for those adults who seek to quit smoking for good and find flavoured e-cigs effective.”
The IEVA also expressed concern about the impact of the Dutch flavor ban on the debate at the Conference of the Parties to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which is scheduled to take place in November in The Hague.
“Implementing the ban on flavorings could have negative effects on the conference,” cautioned IEVA Chairman Dustin Dahlmann. “Rather, COP9 should pay attention to the topic of harm reduction through e-cigarettes, so that the number of smokers worldwide could be significantly reduced”
“Flavour is not a gateway to youth uptake of smoking. No evidence substantiates the association between vaping flavours and subsequent smoking initiation. We call on the Dutch government to drop this plan. There are no winners in a flavor ban, only losers.”
In late November, the City of Missoula, Montana banned flavored vaping products and not flavored combustible tobacco products. Now, Missoula County is considering using its extraterritorial powers to extend the city’s ban on the sale of flavored vapes and their display five miles outside city limits next week.
If approved, it would be the first time Missoula County applied its extraterritorial powers in four years. The last time it did was related to the city’s smoking ordinance.
“This initially started with the health board adopting a resolution and asking both the commission and City Council to do something to stop the epidemic of youth tobacco, especially using vape products,” said Shannon Therriault, county director of environmental health. “We were seeing a giant increase in the number of kids becoming addicted to nicotine, and a lot of that traces back to flavored tobacco products.”
The city ordinance goes into effect this month.
The city ordinance bans the display of self-service tobacco products of any kind, except where children aren’t permitted. It also banned the sale of all flavored electronic tobacco products, and made it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone under the age of 18.
“The health board reviewed it and approved. Now, it’s coming to the commissioners to review and approve,” said Therriault, according to the Missoula Current. “If approved, it can be applied five miles outside the city limits. It’s great, because it takes in a large amount of the area – the urban area.”
The original city ordinance included a ban on all flavored tobacco, which had the support of health officials but was opposed by dozens of businesses and tobacco users.
The Philippine E-Cigarette Industry Association (PECIA) is urging Senator Ralph G. Recto to reconsider his proposal to limit the flavors available for vapor products to just tobacco and menthol, reports Business World.
Senate Bill (SB) No. 1951, or the proposed Vaporized Nicotine Products Regulation Act, seeks to regulate the importation, manufacture, packaging, distribution, use and promotion of vapor products and heated tobacco products (HTPs).
The bill imposes an 18-year minimum age for the purchase, sale and use of these products. It also prohibits vendors from selling vapor products within 100 meters of a school, playground and other similar facilities.
“We are supportive of the proposal filed by Senator Recto. We believe that our products should not be made available to minors,” said PECIA President Joey Dulay.
“We also share his objectives of ensuring that proper product standards are put in place and that these are implemented by an able and impartial government regulator.”
But while acknowledging that some flavors target youth, Dulay noted that there are also many flavors that are not attractive to kids and have been shown to help adult smokers to switch to these products. As examples, he cited coffee, tea and plain fruit flavors.
Dulay noted that in the U.K., a wide range of flavors is offered for vapor products, which nevertheless have low youth uptake rates. He said this proves that a good law and its proper implementation are key to preventing minors from accessing such products.
The controversial California flavored e-cigarette ban will not take effect on Jan. 1, 2021. The Superior Court for the County of Sacramento approved an agreement between the parties in its case which will suspend the Jan. 1, 2021 date of enforcement until, at the very least, after the signatures are verified for a ballot measure proposal that seeks to repeal the law.
Credit: Viviana Rishe
The law was passed this August and was set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2021. A campaign was started to create a ballot measure for California’s voters to repeal the law. In order to get on the ballot, those in support of the referendum needed to get 623,212 verified signatures from California voters. The group supporting the repeal said it has over 1 million signatures.
But now those signatures need to be verified at the county level, a process that is underway but might not be completed until Jan. 21, 2021, after the law was set to take effect. Now, the parties have agreed to delay the law until after the signature verification process is completed.
If the verified signature threshold is not met, the law would then take effect once the Secretary of State has verified the process is complete. There are also multiple legal challenges to the law that could produce additional delays.
However, if the signatures are verified the flavor ban would be suspended until at least December 2022. California voters would have a chance to either keep the law or roll it back on Nov. 8, 2022. Those results would need to be certified, meaning even if the law was approved by voters it wouldn’t be enforceable until Dec. 8, 2022.
The vapor industry continues to face several regulatory challenges. One of the most challenging of those is the seemingly never-ending battle against flavor bans for e-liquids. As most any vaper will tell you, flavors are instrumental in keeping former smokers from returning to combustible cigarettes. However, flavors are also what many industry regulators and anti-vapor advocates say lure youth to try vaping.
During Vape Live, a three-day virtual trade show and seminar hosted by Ireland-based Vapouround magazine, flavors and flavor bans in the United States, the world’s largest vapor market, were trending topics. Carlo Infurna Wangüemert, a vapor market analyst with ECigIntelligence, a regulatory research resource for the e-cigarette and tobacco alternatives industry, discussed recent market trends and the factors that are influencing the U.S. vapor market.
Wangüemert said that several factors are affecting the U.S. market: the e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury (EVALI) scare, the Covid-19 pandemic and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) premarket tobacco product applications (PMTAs). He said that Covid-19 didn’t impact market growth as much as it impacted consumer behavior.
Yael Ossowski / Credit: Consumer Choice Center
“We’ve seen a reduction of purchasing occasions and an increase of basket sizes [during the Covid-19 crisis],” he said. “We’ve also observed consumers buying a lot before the crisis in order to have enough stock in case of lockdowns, and it might also have affected the supply side as many independent shops had to close or have suffered an important drop of sales.”
Concerning supplies, Wangüemert sees the PMTAs drastically reducing the amount of variety on the market as many brands will try to keep their offerings as simple as possible. Before the FDA’s ban on prefilled flavored vape pods, those products represented half of the U.S. vapor market. Now, there is a rise in disposable e-cigarettes and refillable pod systems, according to Wangüemert. He said that this has led to several innovations in flavor output, such as better coils in open pod systems.
“Basically, hardware manufacturers are trying to develop new features and improving the functionality of their devices to make them small but complex enough to cover all vapers’ needs,” said Wangüemert, citing innovations that allow vapers to change temperature or change from mouth-to-lung to direct-to-lung with just one button as examples.
Refillable pod systems are the fastest-growing trend in the vapor industry, according to ECigIntelligence data. This is because they offer a larger selection of flavored e-liquids. Prefilled pods, however, are dropping because the only available flavors, tobacco and menthol, generate less complexity.
“Prefilled pods … show fairly well how regulation can have an impact on the market,” he said. “This ban is fully enforced online as only those two flavors are offered currently. We’ve observed an ongoing drop in the complexity of their flavors. Tobacco is [now] probably the most important flavor in prefilled pods.”
The U.S. market has also seen a surge in nicotine strengths, brought on mostly by the growing popularity of nicotine salts. Wangüemert said that nicotine salt-based e-liquids have been continually gaining ground during the last three years to the detriment of freebase liquids. “However, it is also interesting to point out that the average nicotine strength of nicotine salts is slowly going down,” he said.
Fruit flavors are also steadily rising in the U.S. market, according to Wangüemert. He said that fruit e-liquids, dessert and candy flavors all consume the Top 5 positions in flavors for e-liquid sales in 2020. “For the fruit category, which is mainly tropical fruits, mainly mango, are the ones helping the most in the growth of that category,” he said, adding that beverage flavors are also growing quickly, with lemonades experiencing a substantial amount of growth. “This might also be linked to the popularity of fruits, as lemonades are likely to contain them,” he explained.
Carlo Infurna Wanguemert / Credit: ECigIntelligence
Looking at tobacco and menthol flavors, Wangüemert explained that e-liquids containing tobacco generally have tobacco as the main flavor. However, menthol is much more popular as a complement to other flavors, such as fruit.
“Only 13 percent of the products that contain menthol have menthol as the main flavor. But [for] the other 87 percent, menthol is a complement or a cooling agent, being particularly popular in the fruit category,” he said. “Of course, these 87 percent of e-liquids that contain menthol that do not have it as the main flavor are more subject to potential bans than menthol-only flavors, which have been already excluded. However, our 2019 vape shop survey points out that menthol and tobacco represent just a small percentage of vape store revenues, meaning that flavor bans at the state level or even the consequences of the PMTA might strongly reduce their income and the vaping market in general as the offerings and variety of e-liquids were strongly reduced.”
Also speaking during Vape Live, Yael Ossowski, deputy director for the Consumer Choice Center (CCC), a consumer advocacy group, said that flavor bans in many U.S. states have had a major impact on the growth of the vapor market. States with strict flavor bans have seen major declines, with many vapers in those states returning to combustible products.
This prompted his organization to rank states by vaping regulations and the impact those regulations had on the vapor market. The group looked at how all 50 states confronted flavor restrictions, taxes and whether the state allowed for online sales. The CCC gave each state a number of points depending upon how much consumers were subject to the criteria. States that scored between 0–10 points received an F, 11–20 points received a C and 21–30 points received an A.
The states best suited for vaping were colored green on the corresponding chart while the worst states were colored red and middle-ground states were colored yellow. “For green states, we’ve got South Carolina, Georgia; we’ve got Iowa, Virginia, Florida, Texas and Oregon. You’ll notice, obviously, the red states, the places where we’re dealing with partial flavor bans, high taxes, shipping restrictions, there’s six of them.
Places like California, New York. You have New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Illinois,” said Ossowski. “Now we have our states in yellow. These are places that had a flavor ban in the past, and perhaps they’ve gotten rid of it, or it has not yet come into force. You have some taxation. It’s probably a bit more moderate than definitely those red states. And it has fewer shipping restrictions. People are able to order their vaping products online.”
One of the worst states, New York, has a tax rate of 20 percent of the retail price. Online sales are banned and all flavored products, except tobacco and menthol, are banned. These states, with low rankings, are also prone to other negatives for the vapor market, such as a growing black market, according to Ossowski.
California also has a statewide ban that is supposed to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. California also has several cities, such as San Francisco, that have banned vapor products entirely. It should be noted that, in California, flavor bans typically are only focused on nicotine vapor products, not marijuana vapor products. This is especially puzzling since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated that the EVALI lung disease scare was caused by black market marijuana vapor products, not nicotine products.
“There is a lot of work that has been done by some very enterprising young journalists that kind of details everything with the black market when it comes to flavored vaping products. And that’s only just now burgeoning up in New York,” Ossowski explained. “There could be a lot more on this. We’re going to see. There’s not the biggest mainstream coverage on this.”
Credit: Consumer Choice Center
One of the main reasons that the CCC compiled the data and ranked the states is that the consumer group doesn’t want other states to follow behind states like California and Illinois by banning or restricting flavored vapor products. Ossowski said that these bans are detrimental to public health.
“It’s very dangerous. And in a way, by making it more expensive and pushing people often to the illegal market, not only are you seeing your price go higher, you’re also making it more difficult for people to acquire the products that they have transitioned away from tobacco to use. And we thought we’d actually be saving their lives and improving their lives. But what we see more often than not is that legislators make it harder,” he said. “They make it more difficult, and they actually put way more cumbersome barriers in the way so that you and I cannot access those products. We really do need to concentrate on laws, on policies, on studies, on figuring out who are the legislative champions that we can turn to in state legislatures or in the federal bureaucracy to be able to ensure that we have better laws that will enable harm reduction, that will enable us to continue to have vaping products for sale.”
Loveland City Council members will put off voting on a ban that may target sales of flavored vaping, smoking and tobacco products until Feb. 16, after a marathon six hours of debate and public comment during Tuesday’s meeting.
Credit: Haiberliu
Council members voted 6-2 to postpone the item, with Mayor Jacki Marsh and Ward II councilor Andrea Samson opposed, and Ward I councilor Richard Ball absent, despite joining for part of the discussion, according to an article in the Loveland Reporter-Reporter.
On Nov. 24, council members voted 6-3 to pass the ban on first reading, with Steve Olson of Ward III and Dave Clark and Don Overcash of Ward IV opposed. A second vote was pushed from Dec. 1 to Tuesday after that agenda item similarly ran late.
Marsh stressed the public health impact of smoking and said she planned to vote “yes” again on the ban. Samson pointed out the 10-plus hours of public comment heard by the council, including concerns shared by members of Loveland’s business community, and questioned the need for more outreach.
After a debate over flavored vaping products ran late during its last session, Loveland’s City Council will try to finish that agenda Tuesday. If a majority of the council votes in favor of the ban a second time, retailers of tobacco and vaping products will be able to apply for licenses starting Jan. 1, and they’ll have through July 1 to clear their remaining inventory of banned items.
Credit: Vaporesso
Council members voted 6-3 on Nov. 24 to introduce the ban, which was recommended by a panel of public health experts and anti-smoking advocates as a way of curbing underaged vaping, according to the Loveland Reporter-Herald.
The ordinance would ban sales of flavored e-juices, flavored smokeless tobacco, menthol cigarettes and any other non-tobacco-flavored vaping or smoking products.
Critics have attacked the ban as overbroad and unfair for law-abiding businesses and consumers, particularly the ban on flavored dip and menthols.
If the Secretary of State’s office determines there is a sufficient number of signatures to qualify the referendum, the new law, which was scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, would be suspended until the voters act on the ballot measure in November 2022.
Opponents needed to collect the signatures of 623,312 registered voters to quality the referendum.
The coalition has received more than $21 million from Philip Morris USA, U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co., and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., among others.
Health advocates criticized the initiative.
“We know Big Tobacco has hidden behind smoke and lies for years to hook generations of young people on deadly tobacco products, and this referendum is just one more tactic to continue the status quo,” said Lindsey Freitas, advocacy director for Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, in a statement. “If this referendum qualifies for the ballot, we’re confident that California voters will reject Big Tobacco’s desperate attempt to keep hooking our kids for a profit. But the delay will be costly and deadly.”
Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the new law in August, denounced the referendum effort when it launched.
“This is Big Tobacco’s latest attempt to profit at the expense of our kids’ health,” Newsom said at the time. “California will continue to fight back and protect children from Big Tobacco.”
The law that Newsom signed would ban the retail sale of flavored tobacco products including menthol and fruit flavors, as well as those used in electronic cigarettes.
In addition to supporting the referendum, the tobacco industry has filed a federal lawsuit against the state, seeking an injunction to block the new law, arguing it is “an overbroad reaction to legitimate public-health concerns about youth use of tobacco products.”
A court hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for Dec. 10.
The Montana city of Missoula wants to ban flavors in e-cigarettes and vapor products, but not combustible tobacco products. The Missoula City Council will vote Monday on the flavored “tobacco ordinance that prohibits the sale of flavored electronic tobacco products,” according to an article in the Missoulian.
Credit: Marko Sokolovic
The ordinance would also prohibit self-serve access to all tobacco products. The vote comes after the city’s Public Safety and Health Committee approved Wednesday amendments to a proposed ordinance which previously sought to ban the sale of all flavored tobacco products in the city. The bill was originally proposed last month.
On Wednesday, the Public Safety and Health Committee approved the amendments in a 9-2 vote with Councilor Jesse Ramos absent and Councilors Sandra Vasecka and John Contos voting against the changes. The ordinance will go before council for final consideration on Monday, Nov. 23.
The changes to the proposed ordinance came after extensive public comment and criticism by some, including the Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce, who said the ban was too broad and would harm local businesses. The ordinance aims to prevent youth access to and use of tobacco and nicotine, and is sponsored by council members Mirtha Becerra, Gwen Jones, Stacie Anderson, Heidi West and Julie Merritt.
Becerra said the new ordinance focuses on flavored electronic tobacco products because they come in an array of flavors and packaging that she said is targeted to children.
The City of Missoula, Montana’s proposal to ban the sale of all flavored tobacco products was sent back to committee for further review. The Missoula City Council made that decision Monday night after some legal questions arose.
The proposed ordinance would ban the sale of all menthol, candy and mint flavored tobacco, smokeless tobacco and e-cigarette products. Missoula took up the proposal after the state health department earlier this year offered and then pulled back a more limited state-wide proposal on banning flavored e-cigarette products.
Proponents of Missoula’s proposal say the products are designed to attract and ultimately hook young people on nicotine. But opponents say the ordinance would devastate local retailers, who point out they already only sell to adults over the age of 21, according to Montana Public Radio (MTPR).
Mirtha Becerra, a member of the city council’s Public Safety and Health Committee, said the committee will soon take a second look at the proposal. Becerra tells MTPR the committee has no intention of watering the proposal down into a resolution with no legal weight behind it.
“The reason behind sending it back to committee is to ensure that we reinforce the ordinance, clarify some definitions, make sure that our data is the most up to date, but keeping it true to the north star, if you will, of that ordinance, which is preventing youth from getting addicted to a life of nicotine problems.”
The committee will again discuss the proposal to ban flavored tobacco product sales in Missoula, next Wednesday, November 4.
A public hearing before the full city council would follow on Monday, November 09.
