Tag: news

South Portland, Maine to Consider Flavor Ban Today

Credit: ATDR
South Portland may become the next Maine community to ban the sale of flavored vaping and other tobacco products.
Under a proposed ordinance, violators would receive a $500 fine that could jump to $2,500 per subsequent violation.
Included in the proposed ban are tobacco products with “any taste or smell relating to fruit, menthol, mint, wintergreen, chocolate, cocoa, vanilla, honey, or any candy, dessert, alcoholic beverage, herb, or spice.”
The city council will hold a hearing Today, according to Spectrum News.
The ordinance is being proposed as a way to prevent young people from becoming addicted to nicotine.
South Portland attempted a ban in 2019 stalled, however, it stalled partly because no other Maine community had yet done so, according to media reports.
Now, both Bangor and Portland have banned flavored tobacco earlier this year following a unanimous vote of its city council.
A recent study showed that less than 5 percent of the 3,500 adult e-cigarette users surveyed quit using e-cigarettes in response to a U.S. flavor ban.
December 6, 2022
Biden Signs First Federal Standalone Marijuana Bill
President Joe Biden officially signed the first piece of standalone federal cannabis reform Friday. The U.S. president signed a marijuana research bill into law that cleared the House in July and the Senate last month.
The act is aimed at providing federal support to facilitate research of cannabis and its potential health benefits. The law gives the U.S. attorney general 60 days to either approve a given application or request supplemental information from the marijuana research applicant.
The Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act also creates a more efficient pathway for researchers who request larger quantities of cannabis.
The act does three things:
Provides a mechanism for the scientific study of cannabidiol and cannabis for medical purposes;
Arranges a pathway for the FDA to approve the commercial production of drugs containing or derived from cannabis; and
Protects doctors who may now discuss the harms and benefits of using cannabis and cannabis derivatives.
The president remains opposed to federal cannabis legalization, but he campaigned on a number of more modest marijuana reforms, including promoting research, decriminalization and rescheduling cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), according to the National Law Review.
Biden also issued a mass pardon for Americans who’ve committed federal marijuana possession cases in October and directed an administrative review into cannabis scheduling. The White House recently listed those actions among the “top accomplishments” for the president.
December 5, 2022
China Gives 12 Years to Heat-not-Burn Smugglers

China’s Intermediate People’s Court of Fangchenggang City, Guangxi has sentenced a number of people for smuggling the hardware and tobacco sticks used in heated tobacco products.
It’s the first time China has made a judgement in a heat-not-burn smuggling case, according to the Fangcheng Customs Anti-smuggling Branch of the Nanning Customs Anti-smuggling Bureau.
The defendants were found guilty of smuggling ordinary goods and articles (IQOS Heatsticks and hardware), and were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonments ranging from 4 to 12 years and fines ranging from ¥200,000 to ¥1 million. The exact number of people sentenced was not reported.
One defendant was found guilty of money laundering and sentenced to 10 months in prison, suspended for one year, fined ¥20,000 yuan, and more than ¥420,000 in money laundering illegal proceeds was recovered.
The investigation began on April 21, 2021, under the unified deployment of the Anti-smuggling Bureau of the General Administration of Customs, the Nanning and Hangzhou Customs Anti-smuggling Bureaus, in conjunction with the tobacco departments of Guangxi, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hunan and other places, synchronized in Fangchenggang, Guangxi, Shaoxing, Zhejiang, and Shenzhen, Guangdong, according to the release.
The illicit goods were collected and seized, and three criminal gangs smuggling the illegal products were successfully detained, and about 4,500 heat-not-burn products were seized.

December 2, 2022
New Zealand Pulls More Than 300 Vape Products

Credit: Gustavo Frazeo
New Zealand’s Vaping Regulatory Authority (VRA) has looked at over 8000 products on store shelves that had been notified to its register.
“For the majority of the products reviewed, no issues have been found, but in some cases, information provided by the manufacturer or importer indicated that they could include prohibited ingredients or they could have nicotine salt levels that exceed the legal limit,” says VRA manager Matthew Burgess.
“Following the review, companies have withdrawn notifications for 340 vaping products, meaning they can no longer be legally sold in New Zealand. We will be publishing a list of products that are no longer notified on the Ministry of Health website shortly.”
Up to 1,800 other vaping products could still be taken off shelves, reports 1news. The authority is working with companies that make or sell them and has given them until next week to provide more information.
Fair Go began investigating illegal sales of vapes to underage customers, and showed a 14-year-old mystery shopper with no identification could buy vapes over the counter.
It’s since been investigating the confusing labelling of vapes and the concentrations of nicotine in some of them.
December 2, 2022
Newfoundland Reverses 2019 Ban on Cannabis Vapes
Credit: ATDR
The government of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador has reversed its late-2019 ban on sales of cannabis vape products.
The decision to carry vape products followed a review of Newfoundland’s cannabis industry by the provincial government and the Newfoundland Labrador Liquor Corp. (NLC), the province’s adult-use cannabis regulator and wholesaler, according to its chief merchandising officer, Peter Murphy, reports MJ Biz Daily.
The change opens a new, albeit limited, market for vapes: Newfoundland was the second-smallest cannabis market among Canada’s 10 provinces in September, with regulated recreational marijuana sales worth 5.7 million Canadian dollars ($4.2 million), or about 1.5 percent of Canadian cannabis sales.
Quebec’s government-owned recreational cannabis monopoly, Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC), still does not sell vapes.
December 2, 2022
Macau Blanket Ban on Vaping Takes Effect Monday
Credit: Sean Hsu
Health authorities in Macau on Thursday sent warnings that any private entity caught breaching the upcoming law that prevents people from carrying e-cigarettes across the border could face a fine of between MOP20,000 ($2,505) and MOP200,000. The new rules go into effect on Dec. 5.
The law, passed by lawmakers in August this yea, is aimed at stamping out vaping among the younger generation. The new law bans all activities associated with the production, selling, distribution, import and export of e-cigarettes, according to media reports.
Violators are liable to a penalty of MOP4,000, with organizations found to have breached the law facing a hefty fine that ranges between MOP20,000 and MOP200,000.
The authorities said that they would beef up education to deter underage people from getting their hands on e-cigarettes.
December 2, 2022
Dutch Vape Flavor Ban to Begin on October 1, 2023

The Netherlands will ban all e-cigarette flavors except tobacco effective Oct. 1, 2023, reports NL Times, citing a government amendment to the Staatscourant. The ban extends to pre-filled e-cigarettes and disposable vapes as well.
The ban was announced in 2020, and will also include banning packaging that depicts anything other than tobacco and restricting rules for naming products.
The RIVM, a public health institute, created a list of 16 ingredients that manufacturers can use to make tobacco flavors.
December 2, 2022
Flavor Ban has Little Impact on Consumer Vaping

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban on flavored tobacco products, except for menthol and tobacco flavors, did not stop consumers from vaping, reports EurekAlert!, citing a study published in Tobacco Control.
The study showed that less than 5 percent of the 3,500 adult e-cigarette users surveyed quit using e-cigarettes in response to the ban. The remaining respondents switched to other forms of tobacco products or flavors of e-cigarettes that are not covered by the ban.
“An increasing body of literature shows that e-cig flavors themselves cause damage when inhaled, so it makes sense to ban flavors,” said Deborah J. Ossip, a tobacco research expert and professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and Center for Community Health and Prevention at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) who co-authored the study. “But the ban doesn’t appear to be working. People—including youth—can still get flavored products and are still using them.”
Lead study author Dongmei Li, associate professor of clinical and translational research, obstetrics and gynecology and public health sciences at URMC, stated that a big issue is that the ban did not cover products such as disposable e-cigarettes and e-cigarettes that use tanks rather than cartridges or pods.
“Other forms of flavored e-cigs, especially disposable e-cigs, have become very popular after the FDA policy,” Li said. “The FDA policy also did not ban menthol[-flavored] or tobacco-flavored products—and our study shows many people switched to menthol-flavored e-cigs after the ban. It seems many people find menthol to be a nice flavor.”
Of the survey respondents, nearly 30 percent switched to tank or disposable flavored e-cigarettes and another 30 percent switched to menthol-flavored or tobacco-flavored pods; 14 percent switched to combustible products, like cigarettes, and 5 percent switched to smokeless tobacco. Less than 5 percent quit using e-cigarettes following the ban.
December 1, 2022
The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

The idea that e-cigarette flavors hook kids is simple, compelling—and false.
By Clive Bates
In a fact sheet titled “Flavored E-cigarettes Hook Kids,” the U.S.-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids asserts that “Flavored e-cigarettes are undermining the nation’s overall efforts to reduce youth tobacco use and putting a new generation of kids at risk of nicotine addiction and the serious health harms that result from tobacco use.” Let us call this “the activist proposition.”
The challenge with simple but false activist propositions is that refuting them can require a lengthy embrace of more complex arguments. Brandolini’s law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, can be expressed: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.” In this article, we shall demonstrate Brandolini’s law by addressing the simple but false activist proposition about flavored e-cigarettes through a series of questions.
First, do flavors cause youth tobacco or nicotine use? The activist proposition builds in an assumption that flavors cause e-cigarette use. Lots of young people use flavored e-cigarettes. Therefore, it is claimed, flavored e-cigarettes must cause young people to use e-cigarettes. But how likely is that? We know from the past that a high proportion of young people can use tobacco if they choose to, mostly without flavors. According to the Monitoring the Future survey, for most of the 1990s, U.S. 12th-grade past 30-day cigarette smoking prevalence was at or above 30 percent. By 2021, teenage cigarette smoking had fallen around 4 percent, but nicotine vaping had reached 20 percent. Perhaps there is a persistent demand for nicotine or tobacco, regardless of whether it is flavored. Also, let’s look over time. In the United States, high school past 30-day vaping was 11.3 percent in 2016, rose to 27.5 percent in 2019 but fell to 14.1 percent by 2022. Yet there was very little change in the availability of flavored e-cigarettes to explain these swings. There are also countries where flavors are widely available but youth vaping is relatively low. Take the U.K., for example, which takes a positive approach to tobacco harm reduction and vaping. Thousands of flavored products are available, but according to a recent official evidence assessment, youth vaping remains below 10 percent. And the U.K. offers us a further important insight: “[D]ata showed that most young people who had never smoked were also not currently vaping (98.3 percent).” This tells us that vaping is highly concentrated in adolescents already open to tobacco use.
Second, so what does cause youth tobacco or nicotine use? Most of the evidence points to characteristics of the individual and their circumstances not tobacco product features. Tobacco use is driven by a complex mix of psychosocial factors, including genetics, parental smoking, poverty, delinquency, rebelliousness, low self-esteem, peer group, etc. A 2016 literature review identified 98 conceptually different potential predictors of smoking onset. A 2019 study looked at stated reasons for e-cigarette use and concluded there were two main drivers: “alternative to cigarettes” and the “larger social environment.” For some young people, tobacco or nicotine use may have functional benefits. It may modulate stress or anxiety, improve concentration or help control conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(ADHD). For others, it may be just frivolous and experimental. In 2019, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked young people why they vaped; the top reason was, “I was curious about them.”
Third, what would teenage vapers do if they were not vaping? Implicit in the activist proposition is the idea that removing flavors will remove the reason to vape and stop the user from vaping. At one level, there is some truth in this. If the products are bland, unpleasant or tasteless, perhaps no one will use them. But here is the problem: What if the demand for tobacco and nicotine has deeper psychosocial causes, such as those discussed above? Removing the flavored products does not make the demand go away. Would the teenage vapers just give up vaping and do more homework and piano practice instead? If the underlying demand remains, that is unlikely. Teenagers interested in nicotine might revert to cigarettes, cigars or other tobacco products. We have some evidence for this: When e-liquid flavors were banned in San Francisco in 2019, there was an increase in teenage smoking compared to other areas where flavors had not been banned. This is hardly a surprise—in one study, young adults were asked what they would do if e-cigarette flavors were banned. About one-third said they were likely to switch to cigarettes.
In 2022, Boston-based public health scientists Mike Siegel and Amanda Katchmar reviewed the body of evidence on youth smoking and vaping, concluding that it “suggests that youth e-cigarette use has instead worked to replace a culture of youth smoking.” Economic analysis also backs this idea—when prices of e-cigarettes increase, youth vaping falls, but youth smoking rises. That tells us that e-cigarettes and cigarettes function as substitutes. If regulators ban e-cigarette flavors, then they should not be surprised if more smoking is the result. For that reason, Siegel and Katchmar concluded “[W]e propose a reevaluation of current policies surrounding e-cigarette sales so that declines in e-cigarette use will not come at the cost of increasing cigarette use among youth and adults.” That is very troubling for the activist proposition—it means policies to address youth vaping cannot be evaluated without concern for their effect on youth smoking. It also means that some youth vaping may be a diversion from smoking and is beneficial. It follows that regulation discouraging vaping could easily be harmful.
Fourth, how would a ban on flavors work? The logic of the activist proposition is that a ban on flavored products would remove flavored products from the market, thus removing the reason for young people to vape. But that is not how prohibitions work in practice. A prohibition does not cause the prohibited product to disappear. But in practice, a prohibition causes the perturbation of a market. It causes changes to the behavior of consumers, legal and illegal suppliers, prices and availability. Foreseeable consequences include switching to cigarettes or other tobacco products; switching to other substances; switching e-cigarettes to the permitted flavors; illicit trade in flavored liquids; home mixing and informal selling; cross-border trade or internet sales; stockpiling and workarounds such as sales of flavors for aromatherapy. Prohibitions change the supply side, and rarely for the better. There should be no mystery about this: Despite longstanding prohibition, the Monitoring the Future survey shows that U.S. 12th-grade past 30-day cannabis use has been around 20 percent and daily use around 5 percent for about the past 25 years. Some of these responses to flavor prohibition will clearly increase harm compared to vaping. Because smoking is so much more harmful, it would only take a slight uptick in smoking to offset any benefit of significantly reduced teenage vaping. But there are also hazards arising from informal manufacturing and workarounds. Illicit supply will bring adolescents into contact with criminal networks as consumers and potentially as low-level participants.
Fifth, what is really going on with youth vaping? I believe there are two broad patterns of youth vaping and two distinct behaviors at work, but these are often conflated. The first is frivolous and experimental use, where young people try new things. This has characteristics of a frothy fad: infrequent use, transient and unpredictable. The second is more determined nicotine use: frequent, intense and entrenched. But this group is more likely to be the adolescents who would otherwise be using cigarettes or other tobacco products. The first group contributes to the “youth vaping epidemic” narrative but is not really a cause for great public health concern. The second group represents the migration of nicotine use in society to far safer technologies and is likely beneficial for public health. The activist proposition, however, requires policymakers to believe there is no latent demand for nicotine use and that removing products will eliminate nicotine from society. But it is much more plausible to think of the demand for nicotine in similar terms to alcohol, caffeine, cannabis and other recreational substances. People use nicotine for a reason, and there will be a long-term demand for it. The task for policymakers and regulators is to make that acceptably safe and to resist simplistic activist propositions that are likely to do more harm than good.
In November 2022, the Campaign For Tobacco Free Kids celebrated the success of a mass activist campaign to secure Proposition 31, a ban on flavored products in California. They may have won their political battle, and their aggressive promotion of the activist proposition has again prevailed. But nowhere in its advocacy literature does this powerful coalition level with California’s voters about the underlying drivers of youth nicotine use, the linkages between smoking and vaping, and the risks of unintended consequences. They can deny this real-world complexity, but policies built on bullshit have a nasty tendency to go wrong, to do more harm than good and to call into question the credibility of their advocates.
Clive Bates is the director of Counterfactual Consulting and the former director of Action on Smoking and Health (U.K.).

December 1, 2022
Australia to Weigh Tougher Shipping, Packaging Rules
Credit: Ymgerman
Australia’s government says it will consider key changes including tightening importation rules and toughing up labelling laws for e-cigarettes in an effort to prevent youth use.
Australia’s drugs regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), will begin public consultation in four areas:
changes to importation and border control laws required to stop illegal products entering Australia;
pre-market assessments of vapes to create a regulated source of products for pharmacists and doctors to prescribe;
labelling, advertising and flavoring of vapes that make them attractive to children;
and stronger identification and regulation of nicotine-containing products.
Additionally, Health Minister Mark Butler announced menthol cigarettes will be banned, along with other cigarette flavors and additives, according to media reports.
The public consultation on vaping reforms will be open until Jan. 16. Butler will meet that same month with state and territory health ministers to discuss how a response to vaping can be coordinated nationally.
New graphic warnings for tobacco will be created, Butler said, and for the first time the government will look at requiring warnings like “smoking kills” on every individual cigarette, and changing the colors of cigarettes to be more unappealing.
He said the appealing names of products will also be tackled, health promotion inserts will be put into every cigarette packet and advertising regulations will be updated to include vaping products.
Tobacco control expert and member of the Australian Council On Smoking and Health, Maurice Swanson, said Butler had contributed to a “major step forward for public health and tobacco control in Australia”. But on vaping, he said Butler must “urgently” make the importation of all e-cigarettes prohibited, regardless of whether they contained nicotine.
“This regulation will empower Border Force to seize all e-cigs unless they are accompanied by a doctor’s prescription required by the TGA regulations,” he said.
November 30, 2022