The Philippine National Police (PNP) yesterday announced that it would arrest students caught vaping and smoking in public places.
In an interview aired over dzBB, PNP Public Information Office chief Col. Redrico Maranan said the police would be enforcing the laws and ordinances by local government units against vaping and smoking, according to PhilStar Global.
“Yes, we will (also apprehend students vaping and smoking.) Our local ordinances will be enforced by the police, as ordered by our chief PNP (Gen. Benjamin Acorda Jr.),” Maranan said, according to media reports.
He explained that the ordinances would be a big help in ensuring discipline among the people.
“These local ordinances will ensure that discipline and the obedience of the people will return. So, that is part of the things that will be enforced by the police in communities,” he said.
He also underscored the Oplan Bisita Eskwela of the PNP, which requires police officers to go to communities and patrol schools.
“The police should go to schools and connect with principals, teachers and students,” Maranan said.
“There are crimes in schools, whether connected to fraternities and rumbles. Our police should be there in schools and coordinate with our school officials,” he added.
The trial of the San Francisco Unified School District’s lawsuit against Marlboro maker Altria continues this week. At the end of the first week, jurors heard testimony that use of vape pens by students had declined before more than doubling from 2017 to 2019.
Only a little more than 7 percent of students throughout the district had reported using vape pens in 2017, former district health administrator Erica Lingell testified Friday. By 2019, she said, that figure had more than doubled to 16 percent.
Lingell said students were using Juul and the district was scrambling to build support systems and give guidance to teachers and staff about them, according to Courthouse News.
“We didn’t have anything for this new substance that the kids were using,” Lingell said in answer to questioning by the school district’s attorney Dena Sharp. “We didn’t have lessons. We didn’t have enough research except for what experts were telling us.”
The school district was building systems to combat Juul from scratch, the attorney claimed. Even after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the sale of e-cigarettes in the city — the corporate home of Juul Labs — in 2019, youth use continued.
For school district officials, it was a scramble to pull together the resources needed to combat Juul’s growth among students. “It was like flying the plane while we were building it,” said Lingrell.
For other substance use issues in the district, there were materials lesson plans, and support groups in place to help teachers tackle the problem. Students leaving class to smoke would interfere with teaching time for the rest of the kids, she said. “Teachers have an incredibly hard and busy schedule already. One kid being gone affects everybody.”
Much of the school district’s argument in its case against Altria involves the distraction which occurred when vaping became “endemic,” interfering not only with teachers’ abilities to control their classrooms but nearly all levels of student life.
The bellwether trial forces Altria to publicly defend itself solo for the first time as it faces thousands more cases that were brought against the company and Juul. In December, Juul Labs agreed to pay more than $1.2 billion to settle more than 5,000 suits blaming the company for a youth vaping epidemic across the U.S.
Juul and Altria defended the first trial that started in March over a case brought by Minnesota over deceptive marketing of e-cigarettes. The companies last month settled the state’s case, though details are yet to be disclosed.
In April, Juul agreed to pay $462 million to six states and the District of Columbia to resolve lawsuits and investigations into the marketing of addictive vaping products to children.
The Vapor Technology Association continues its mission to promote sensible regulation.
By Timothy S. Donahue
In many countries, such as the U.K., vaping is synonymous with harm reduction. These governments recognize the harm reduction benefits of vaping versus smoking combustible cigarettes. They actively engage their citizens in “swap to stop” efforts backed by sound policy and known science.
In the U.S., however, the Food and Drug Administration is actively pursuing policies that protect, if not elevate, combustible tobacco products’ status in the marketplace and limit consumer access to alternatives that are safer than cigarettes, according to Tony Abboud, the executive director of the Vapor Technology Association (VTA). Abboud and the VTA have been instrumental in advocating for rational science-based regulations for vaping products that will enable a diverse and robust industry to thrive in the U.S.
Vapor Voice sat down with Abboud to discuss the current state of vaping and the future of the VTA. He said that one needs only look at the fact that the FDA is authorizing combustible tobacco products over less harmful vaping products at a rate of 45:1. This is a huge problem for an evolving and innovative industry but with graver public health consequences.
Vapor Voice: What is the current state of the vaping industry in the U.S. in your opinion?
Tony Abboud, director of the Vapor Technology Association. To learn more about the Vapor Technology Association
Abboud: Today, the U.S. industry remains in unnecessary regulatory chaos due to the FDA’s lack of vision in executing its statutory obligations, loss of focus on its harm reduction mission and reactionary decisions made to ameliorate political pressure of special interest groups untethered from science.
[The] FDA’s obstinate inability or refusal to speak truthfully about the importance of less harmful nicotine alternatives, such as vaping and modern oral nicotine products, is imperiling its clearly articulated mission to end smoking. Specifically, [the] FDA’s actions to date have only driven up the public’s irrational fear of nicotine vaping, a fear that can only cement consumers’ bond with cigarettes.
[The] FDA’s unscientific and dramatic policy shifts (cloaked as case-by-case decision-making) have plunged the agency and the industry into costly and unnecessary litigation that will take years to resolve, and, thus, it will be years before a rational regulated marketplace will exist. The net result is that, rather than creating a clear and achievable pathway for innovative companies to introduce new technologies that are 2 [times] to 3 times more effective at helping people quit smoking than the few products, FDA’s actions will continue to drive a wedge between people who smoke cigarettes that kill and the myriad options that will give them dramatic relief.
It is essential that companies in the industry galvanize behind thoughtful efforts to reset the narrative, demand accountability and make common sense changes. It is equally essential that [the] FDA resets its narrative, unapologetically follows the science and uses its power not to rob Americans looking for alternatives to cigarettes but empower them with myriad attractive options that will entice them to switch.
Now that the Covid shutdown and Zoom calls have ended, what has changed for the VTA?
Organizationally, one of the biggest impacts of Covid was the recognition that we had to focus our efforts on the biggest challenges that needed to be addressed rather than taking on every fight. That refocusing has enabled us to architect a thoughtful and impactful strategy to engage with policymakers and decision-makers on the issues most critical to our industry and to public health.
From a practical perspective, the biggest change in the reopening of this country has been the reopening of congressional offices, which only fully occurred this year. That change has made it possible for our team to sit down across the table this year and have meaningful and essential conversations with congressional offices and to bring voices into the fold that have not been heard before. We are on pace this year to far outstrip our prior levels of congressional engagement with a clear and persuasive policy message not only based on science but also supported by leading tobacco control scientists.
What are the VTA’s goals for 2023?
There are 34 million Americans who still smoke. Every two years, a million of them will die from smoking-related diseases. This is an unconscionable and ongoing public health crisis. We can save tens of thousands of lives by not hiding the fact that vaping is far less risky than smoking.
In this year, our priorities are a set of common sense new marketing standards and smart science-based access restrictions for flavored vape products to ensure such flavored products remain available for adult smokers while less accessible to youth. At the same time, we will continue our constructive engagement with [the] FDA to provide insight on the key policy issues and specific regulatory strategies that are necessary to achieve a rationally regulated marketplace.
What will it take to accomplish these goals?
Despite the FDA’s parroting of its mantra that it “follows the science,” the examples of where it has failed to do so have become too numerous to ignore. And despite the FDA’s proclaimed concerns about misinformation, the examples of which it has engaged in are simply too extreme to believe that the agency can easily correct the course it has embarked upon to denigrate, dismiss and deny alternative nicotine products. Hence, public pressure, congressional oversight and accountability in the courts all are necessary to ensure that FDA adheres to the science, follows the law and corrects the record.
In addition, notwithstanding the dramatic decline in youth vaping (now at pre-“epidemic” levels) that has taken place even with the broad availability of flavored products, the industry must continue to demonstrate its commitment to reducing youth access and appeal by supporting long overdue and common sense marketing restrictions that will further reduce underage use. Additionally, just like with 21-plus legislation, for which the industry advocated, new 21-plus policies can further limit youth access to flavored vaping products.
Given the chaos in the marketplace created by [the] FDA’s past and present actions, and its apparent policy to bar every nontobacco-flavored vape product from the marketplace, congressional action can help calm the chaos by adopting leading tobacco control scientists’ recommendations that flavored vape products be sold in adult-only stores, making them less accessible to youth while preserving the availability of adults. All of our goals and strategies are based on both data and science as we continue to amplify the voice and role of science in the decision-making process.
Is there any hope for open systems and/or flavors?
Yes. Facts are stubborn things. There is no scientific or real-world evidence that youth are attracted to or use open systems in any material numbers. At the same time, data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey year after year proves that flavors are now one of the least cited reasons that youth may experiment with vaping.
And each day, more and more peer-reviewed science is published proving the important role that flavored vaping plays in the decision to switch away from deadly combustible cigarettes, particularly when compared to the FDA’s favorite ineffective solutions. There is also hope in the fact that the industry will continue to innovate.
There will be new technologies that capture the market in the future, and we should be open to that—and so should [the] FDA. Flavors are proven to be the preference for adults who are looking to quit, and adults are more likely to succeed when flavors are available to them. Consumers’ demand for flavored nicotine products should be no more paternalistically rejected than consumers’ demand for cannabis products.
Are nontobacco nicotine products going to gain broad acceptance, especially with regulators?
Well, that is entirely up to the FDA now that Congress was convinced by certain industry players that nontobacco nicotine was somehow a problem. True, it was a problem, but primarily for certain businesses which were dependent on tobacco-derived nicotine. But the reality is that nontobacco nicotine is the cleanest and purest form of nicotine available on the market, which is perfectly replicable and traceable to the batch level.
Nontobacco nicotine is precisely the type of innovation in a constantly changing landscape that should be encouraged as the industry advances toward a combustible-free future. Regulators have a huge opportunity to use their authority to regulate nontobacco (synthetic) nicotine products and to encourage their entry into the marketplace. But, given [the] FDA’s current trend toward eliminating virtually all nicotine alternatives from the market, one can only question whether [the] FDA could seize the opportunity to provide consumers access to products that would allow them to break free from the last vestige of tobacco.
Do you see congressional action as the only cure to the current FDA regulatory process?
Congressional action can help, but the challenges are significant. There are three ways that Congress can assist. The first is through its oversight committees, which have jurisdiction to question the FDA’s prior actions that have been inconsistent with the law and inconsistent with, according to CTP’s [Center for Tobacco Products] scientists, the science on vaping.
The second is through its appropriations committees, which must question exactly how FDA is using the hundreds of millions of dollars it receives, why it uses the majority of its resources to remove e-cigarettes from the market while ushering hundreds of new cigarettes to the market and what could possibly justify its request for another $100 million in fees that ultimately will be borne by the vaping consumer (giving them yet another disincentive to switch).
The third is through committees of jurisdiction that can end the absurd discussion of “ban, ban, ban” when it comes to flavors and instead focus on real solutions to real marketing issues of which vaping opponents have complained for years but have never truly sought to address.
Congressional action is not the only cure because [the] FDA currently has placed its thumb on the scale by creating a standard for companies seeking to comply and secure marketing approval without giving them the knowledge or opportunity to do so. For that reason, [the] FDA appears content with letting the courts sort out the mess that it has created.
After all, CTP appears to take delight in declaring that every vaping product on the market is “illegal” and “cannot be lawfully marketed” except for the small handful of tobacco-flavored products [the] FDA has authorized. So, while regulators often complain about industry lawyers, it should come as no surprise that the actions of prior agency leadership, which in a very short period of time demanded a complete reversal of CTP’s priorities, plans and policies as they related to flavored vaping products, would lead to legal challenges.
In the end, any branch of our federal government can have a major impact in fixing the mess created by a disregard for science and the law. The question now is which one(s) will do so.
The Alabama Legislature passed a bill this week that bans smoking or vaping in a car with children 14 years old and younger.
House Bill 3 was created by Birmingham Representative Rolanda Hollis. She says she’s pushed for this for six years now.
The bill makes it illegal to smoke or vape inside a car with the windows up or down, whether it’s on or off. A violation of this can result in a $100 fine, according to WBRC.
“We’re going to save these kids from having bad allergies, having respiratory issues and everything that goes along with second-hand smoke,” said Hollis. “Even saving them from, as they go along in life, from getting cancer.”
The bill is now waiting on the governor’s signature to make it law.
The Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association continues to help business owners navigate regulation.
By Timothy S. Donahue
In 2012, the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association (SFATA), a trade association representing small and large vaping businesses, began when the industry was still in its infancy. The trade group has been a staple in the tobacco harm reduction circle for more than a decade fighting for balanced regulations in the United States. It hasn’t been easy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has nearly decimated the numerous small business owners who once made up most of the vaping industry.
While the industry has had to evolve, so have the trade industry groups that support it. The SFATA began as an advocacy group for states in its early stages. As federal regulation began to come into reality in 2016, the SFATA altered course and focused on getting balanced regulations on the federal level. In 2021, however, after the FDA either denied or failed to review over 8 million premarket tobacco product applications (PMTAs), it sent the industry scrambling, explains SFATA Board President and CEO April L. Meyers.
“In the winter of that year, it also sent the states scrambling, so we had to shift our focus from federal to state so that we could save as many small businesses as we could,” she says. “There were several battlefronts and issues, most notably, flavor bans.” The organization had success at the state level. The SFATA had stopped several flavor bans. It was around this time that the organization also introduced its Responsible Industry Network (RIN) program.
The RIN program helps retailers combat the problem of youth use. It’s a program that provides a postmarket surveillance pathway through data, training, accountability and corrective measures for vapor manufacturers, distributors and retailers as well as a method for law enforcement and regulatory authorities to ensure that significantly fewer vapor products end up in the hands of youth. The RIN program serves the interest of business owners navigating the complexity of a highly regulated market while also assisting enforcement agencies.
Additionally, authorities can confiscate products that do find their way into the hands of youth and conduct enforcement actions against the parties who are responsible, whether they are manufacturers, distributors, retailers or straw buyers, such as family members or friends. An added value for the industry is that curtailing youth access will lower the biased media attacks that the vapor industry targets children, creating a more stable regulatory environment that allows businesses to grow.
April Meyers, SFATA
“If you’re a small [-sized] to mid-sized manufacturer and you received a marketing order, you’d have to either hire somebody full-time to collect the data for postmarket surveillance or spend a lot of valuable time trying to do it yourself,” said Meyers. “That’s where we came up with a program that streamlines the process. Everybody’s got the same due dates and the same forms. And then the agency is looking at the same form coming in at the same time.”
To receive a marketing order, the FDA states that it “intends to consider how an applicant will target the marketing of its new tobacco product to reach its intended consumers of legal age and to assess the potential effect on nonusers.” The FDA will also consider how the applicant intends to minimize the extent to which youth can access the product and are exposed to its marketing.
“If the PMTA does not address youth access to the product, youth exposure to the product’s labeling, advertising, marketing and promotion, and youth initiation, such as describing how it proposes to restrict the sale or distribution of its product to limit potential youth access to the product, it’s going to be impossible to get a marketing order,” said Meyers. “[The] FDA may be unable to determine that the applicant has made a showing that permitting the marketing of the new tobacco product would be appropriate for the protection of public health. RIN can help provide that data. And that data can be useful in several meaningful ways.”
The RIN program will create a rich database that will expose useful sales and marketing insights for participants, according to Meyers. She said that the data can show aggregate buying and selling behaviors of vapor products, data that can also be useful when faced with federal and state flavor bans and taxation bills.
In order to further help its members, Meyers said the SFATA recently entered a “strategic alignment” with the United States Vaping Association (USVA). She said that teamwork is an important aspect of vapor advocacy and that businesses need to support each other. The partnership creates a more unified voice and prevents wasting valuable industry resources by multiple organizations doing the same work.
“You’d have to be a dual member to realize the full benefits of advocacy. We’re also trying to make it reasonably priced where a store that’s on its feet and planning to move forward can participate,” she explains. “And we wanted to keep it even across the board because we don’t want to tell a big company that you must pay more just because you’re bigger. Nor a small company [that] you have to pay so much, and then they get costed out.”
Currently, the USVA is focused on winning its lawsuit against the FDA. The USVA believes the regulatory agency didn’t consider the economic impact on small businesses that the PMTA process and subsequent denial orders would have. The USVA suit claims that the FDA acted as if vapor applicants would be able to substantially rely on public data or on 70 studies that the FDA itself was conducting at that time. However, the FDA instead wrote an impossibly burdensome PMTA rule that began putting people out of business.
The suit is hoping the courts declare the PMTA final rule in violation of the Regulatory Flexibility Act, an effort by the U.S. federal government to balance the social goals of federal regulations with the needs and capabilities of small businesses and other small entities. The USVA also hopes the judges remand the PMTA final rule to the FDA and enjoin the agency from enforcing the final rule against any members of the USVA. This would also include joint SFATA members.
The suit also criticizes the FDA for prioritizing manufacturers with the greatest market share, companies that were more well funded to tackle the PMTA process. Some of the larger companies were also allowed to make changes to issues with their PMTA submissions whereas smaller companies with the same issues received marketing denial orders for those issues.
Credit: Rafel
“If the courts hand down an emergency injunction for relief, it would mean that every member of the USVA, SFATA joint members and the named plaintiffs on the case go back into review. Where we found synergy between the organizations is if you go back into review, what happens? Are you better off? No. Do you have more time? Yes. Can you make more money in the extra time you’ve been given? Yes. But then what? If you don’t address the broken process, that is the PMTA, you have nothing,” said Meyers. “It affects every state, every business, every vapor product retailer.”
Meyers explained that joining the SFATA helps to safeguard that manufacturers are able to produce products and businesses are able to sell lifesaving vapor devices. The organization is currently laser-focused on the U.S. House of Representatives and is dedicated to trying to do its part to stamp out overzealous and overreaching legislation.
“We focus on the House because that’s where the oversight is of FDA, and that’s where most bills also get introduced. So that’s where we’ve put our focus and where most of our meetings will be concentrated on at the federal level for this year’s session,” she said. “The FDA’s rules are the problem. The members of the House we have spoken to understand that the process is broken. We are presenting science-based solutions and innovation to show that it can be fixed.” While legal action safeguards against the lack of guidance and transparency from the FDA, the SFATA is working with lawmakers to ensure that its “commonsense solutions for American smokers” are understood and communicated to the FDA and Congress, which oversees the agency, according to Meyers.
“The recent report from the Reagan-Udall Foundation found numerous wide-ranging problems at CTP,” she said. “Now Congress is asking the FDA to answer those same questions the Reagan-Udall report asked … SFATA is asking those questions too. What is your strategy? What is your plan? What are you going to do? There’s a lot of pressure on FDA to do something and be clear about it. [The] FDA can’t come up with that plan by themselves. They need industry insight and support. Our goal is to come up with that input. That’s why you would support SFATA. You want to be a part of that conversation and get that information. We are here to help.”
U.S. cigarette smoking dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 9 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released Thursday. Meanwhile, electronic cigarette use rose, to about 1 in 17 adults.
The preliminary findings from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are based on survey responses from more than 27,000 adults.
Last year, the percentage of adult smokers dropped to about 11 percent, down from about 12.5 percent in 2020 and 2021. The survey findings sometimes are revised after further analysis, and CDC is expected to release final 2021 data soon.
E-cigarette use rose to nearly 6 percent last year, from about 4.5 percent the year before, according to survey data.
The Philippines government is set to remove 15,000 more noncompliant electronic cigarette sellers in online marketplaces, reports The Philippine Star.
“We have monitored almost 15,000 sellers online,” said Ruth Castelo, trade undersecretary. “We’ve advised platforms to remove almost 15,000 we observed that were noncompliant. These sellers all have cases already.”
Unregistered vapor products are subject to the Vape Law, which came into effect Dec. 28, 2022, and prohibits flavors, colorful caricatures on packaging and selling products within 100 meters of schools, among other restrictions.
“If online platforms would just strictly follow, there is no need to remove the sale of this product from them,” said Castelo. “It’s already indicated which products they can’t sell, but some still evade detection.”
In the U.S. state of Louisiana, the House Judiciary Committee voted 7-3 Thursday to advance a bill prohibiting flavored nicotine-based e-liquid products.
House Bill 179, was authored by Rep. William Wheat who is concerned with the rising use of vapor and tobacco products by younger people. He described it as being “in epidemic proportions.” Brian King, the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s tobacco center, recently said that there is currently no vaping “epidemic.“
Witnesses testified about the dangers of vaping. One witness was the mother of a Baton Rouge boy who died after using vapor and nicotine products, according to media reports.
According to Wheat, 52 percent of high school students have tried e-cigarettes — three times as many as in a study done in 2015.
The most recent data available from the Louisiana Department of Health’s 2019 youth tobacco survey found that 15 percent of middle school students and 32 percent of high school students currently vape. The trend of youth vaping has declined dramatically since 2019. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in 2022 only 14 percent of high schoolers vape nationally, according to the AP.
Wheat said a bill was passed in a prior session making it illegal for someone under 21 years old to buy tobacco and nicotine products. However, that has not stopped younger people from obtaining them.
He went on to say he was trying to “make sense of that and get things headed in a different direction.”
“HB 179 is not a perfect answer,” Wheat said. He added: “But it is our job to make the first step.”
The Australian government is expected to announce a crackdown on illegal vaping as early as next week, as concerns rise over the increasing uptake among teenagers.
The health minister, Mark Butler, will announce long-mooted changes to vaping regulation, including introducing plain packaging and a ban on certain flavors, ahead of the federal budget on May 9, according to media reports.
News.com.au first reported on Friday that Butler had promised “substantial action”, saying the government planned to move on “non-pharmaceutical” vapes, and indicating a focus on importation from overseas.
He told the publication there had been enforcement issues – because vapes are imported in small boxes, making them hard to intercept at the border, and a reluctance for state and territories to divert resources to policing the black market.
“So we’ve got to take action on the border,” Butler said. “States have to take some action around policing and retail arrangements. I think there’s the appetite to do that.”
Butler’s office declined to comment on the news.com.au report. However, Guardian Australia understands the minister will discuss a vaping crackdown in his speech to the National Press Club on May 2, a week before the federal budget.
The U.K. Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) has published a comprehensive “Greenprint for Sustainable Vaping” following an industry-wide consultation.
The development of the green action plan was realized with input from leading players in the waste industry, regulators, the retail sector, vape manufacturers and experts in consumer behavior. It comes as the industry has faced increased scrutiny regarding the environmental impact of vapes, particularly single-use products known as disposables.
“Whilst entry-level single-use devices are responsible for record numbers of adult smokers switching to vaping due [to] their ease of use and convenience, the industry realizes that much more must be done to safeguard against their impact on the environment,” said UKVIA CEO John Dunne. “The fact is that disposables have been around for a while but have become hugely popular in the last couple of years, particularly with those on low incomes who are amongst the most prevalent smokers.
“The Greenprint aims to mobilize environmental action to support a sustainable vaping sector in the future. It covers the development of recycling infrastructure, which is fit for the vaping industry, new vape innovations that make products more recyclable and reusable as well as the support that needs to be put in place to encourage greater retailer and consumer participation in the environmentally conscious disposal of vape products.”
