Tag: regulation

Juul Labs to Pay Indiana $15.7 Million to Settle Suit

Credit: Niro World
Juul Labs Inc. will pay Indiana more than $15.7 million to settle allegations that the company deliberately marketed its products to minors, Attorney General Todd Rokita announced today. Indiana is one of 32 states participating in a larger agreement under which Juul Labs will pay out nearly $435 million.
“My team and I fight daily to protect Hoosiers from improper business practices that put families at risk,” Rokita said, as reported by am1050. “Wrongful actions that jeopardize children are especially repugnant and shameful. Fortunately, the money we have recovered in this settlement can go toward safeguarding the same young people targeted by the unethical marketing strategies employed by Juul.”
Indiana’s funds are intended to be used in support of prevention, education, harm reduction and mitigation efforts related to youth using electronic nicotine-delivery systems.
Juul Labs has an option to pay over 6-10 years — with the total payout increasing the longer it takes to pay. If Juul Labs chooses a 10-year option, Indiana’s amount would exceed $17.1 million. Juul’s first payment to Indiana will be $1,478,665 — due Dec. 31, 2022. All additional payments are due on Dec. 31 each year.
Juul Labs announced today that it had settled more than 5,000 lawsuits covering more than 10,000 individual plaintiffs.
December 7, 2022
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
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
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
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
RJ Reynolds Asks SCOTUS to Stop California Flavor Ban

Credit: Sean Pavone Photo
R.J. Reynolds and other vaping and tobacco companies filed a request Tuesday asking the Supreme Court of the United States to impose an emergency order to stop California from enforcing a ban on flavored vaping and other tobacco products.
The ban was overwhelmingly approved by voters earlier this month.
First passed by the state legislature two years ago, the ban never took effect after tobacco companies gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot, according to media reports.
However, after nearly two-thirds of voters approved of banning the sale of everything from cotton-candy flavored e-liquid to menthol cigarettes. The law is set to go into effect by Dec. 21.
Supporters of the ban say the law was necessary to put a stop to a staggering rise in teen smoking.
Several companies filed suit over filed a lawsuit against California in federal court over the state’s ban on flavored products one day after voters backed the ban in a Nov. 8 referendum. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday denied the company’s emergency motion to block the law pending appeal.
The companies suing California argue that the authority to ban flavored products rests in federal law. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gives the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco.
In the filing, the companies said they would suffer “irreparable harm” from not being able to sell the products in one of the nation’s largest markets.
The companies argued that small retailers will face laying off employees and possibly closing. Among those filing for the order is the Neighborhood Market Association, a group of San Diego retailers that include vape shops.
November 30, 2022
Consumer Group Denounces EU Vape Tax Proposal

The World Vapers’ Alliance (WVA) has denounced the EU’s leaked plan to increase vaping taxes, according to the U.K. Vaping Industry Association.
“The [EU] Commission claims that higher taxes will improve public health, but the reality is the exact opposite,” said WVA Director Michael Landl. “A less harmful alternative, such as vaping, must be affordable for ordinary smokers trying to quit cigarettes. If the commission wants to reduce the burden of smoking on public health, they must make vaping more affordable and accessible, not less.
“High taxes hit the least advantaged people most. In times of multiple crises and people struggling to make ends meet, making vaping more expensive is the opposite of what we need. Policymakers must understand that tax increases on vaping will force people back to smoking or the black market, a scenario nobody wants. In times of crisis, people shouldn’t be further punished by an unscientific and ideological fight against vaping. This must be stopped,” said Landl.
“Rather than fighting vaping, the EU finally must embrace tobacco harm reduction. What we need is risk-based regulation. Vaping is 95 percent less harmful than smoking and, therefore, must not be treated the same way as conventional smoking,” added Landl.
November 29, 2022
Brussels to Propose First EU-Wide Vaping Levy
In a long-anticipated move, the European Union is to propose a bloc-wide vaping tax policy as part of a shake-up of levies on the tobacco industry. The new rules would also double excise duties in member states with low cigarette taxes, according to a draft European Commission document.
The update to the 2011 EU tobacco taxation directive will tax novel smoking products, such as e-cigarettes, vapes and heated tobacco, comparatively with combustible cigarettes as policymakers worldwide take an increasingly dim view of the new products’ popularity among young people.
Products with a high nicotine content would have an excise duty of at least 40 percent applied to them, while lower-strength vapes will face a 20 percent duty. Heated tobacco products will also be hit by 55 percent duty, or a tax rate of €91 per 1,000 items sold.
The changes to legislation, part of a push by Brussels to cut smoking rates, will increase the EU’s minimum excise duty on cigarettes from €1.80 to €3.60 per pack of 20, which would raise prices in eastern European nations where packs can sell for under €3.
Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at HEC Paris business school, told the Financial Times that the absence of an EU-wide excise framework for vaping and heated tobacco products had been “weakening tobacco control efforts” across the bloc.
Excise duties on cigarettes would also increase considerably in countries such as Austria and Luxembourg where prices are low relative to income. The tax rise on cigarettes is expected to generate an extra €9.3 billion for EU member states.
The changes aim to speed up the EU’s push for a “tobacco-free generation” by 2040. As part of the EU’s Beating Cancer Plan, health officials want to drive tobacco use among EU citizens from the current level of about 25 percent down to 20 percent in 2025, and below 5 percent by 2040.
The commission this month imposed a ban on flavored heated tobacco products to curtail a surge in demand among younger consumers. In the U.S., regulators at the Food and Drug Administration have moved to ban popular vaping products, such as Juul.
Peter van der Mark, secretary-general of the European Smoking Tobacco Association, an industry body, warned that “if you have a sudden very steep increase, you can create a market for illicit trade.” Dustin Dahlmann, president of the Independent European Vape Alliance, added that imposing taxes on novel tobacco products could lead to “the much less harmful alternatives” to smoking being “taxed far too heavily in many countries.”
A leaked impact assessment said that the increase in the minimum excise duty would have “a strong impact on consumers and economic operators” in EU states where cigarette prices were low, including Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. The assessment also noted that the excise duty on novel tobacco products “which are particularly appealing to young people, who are at risk of developing addiction” would aid public health efforts to cut tobacco use.
The proposal will have to be agreed by all EU member states before it is enshrined in law. British American Tobacco, one of the world’s biggest cigarette manufacturers, stressed this was “the beginning of a long legislative process.”
November 27, 2022
New York Issues First Retail Licenses for Marijuana
Credit: Spyrakot
New York regulators last week issued the first 36 marijuana retail licenses for an adult-use market that officials insist will open by year’s end.
That timeline took a positive turn when the state’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) announced it would allow qualifying businesses to launch delivery services before opening their retail stores, a significant change from other recreational markets, according to MJBizDaily.
“This will help jumpstart sales and enable these small business owners to generate capital and scale their operations,” the regulatory agency tweeted Monday.
New York adult-use retailers are projected to generate $1 billion-$1.2 billion in sales next year, growing to $2.2 billion-$2.7 billion by 2026, according to the 2022 MJBiz Factbook.
Regulators said 28 of the retail license winners went to individuals with marijuana convictions or family members who’d been arrested for cannabis.
The other eight licenses went to nonprofits.
The first group of Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) license winners include:
Capital District Cannabis & Wellness.
Essential Flowers.
Kush and Kemet.
Gotham CUARD.
NYCCABUDS.
The agency is reviewing 903 CAURD applicants, the state’s version of social equity, to issue the first 150 adult-use licenses, as well as helping them lease and fund operations through a proposed $200 million social equity cannabis fund.
November 26, 2022