Ah great - SCOTUS will likely side with the e-sig companies, with absolutely no bribes involved, then e-cig companies will flood the market with colourful, flavoured products designed to entice young people (who may never have smoked otherwise) into starting on e-cigs.
I knew what these were the moment I first saw them advertised as a way to get people to quit smoking - they are, and always were a trojan horse designed to entice a new generation of nicotine addicts. Nothing more, nothing less.
I actually used vapes (the "real" ones) to stop smoking. It took years, but having the capability of controlling how much nicotine I had in my vape liquid was key. Eventually I brought it down to zero, and was able to stop.
This said, in europe the market is being flooded with disposable, colourful vapes - and those are an abomination. Just thinking of trashing all those lithium batteries makes me angry.
Here in Canada they are replacing refillable vapes with those trash filling disposable and the only nicotine level available are 20 or 0.
No more 12, 6, 3mg, noooooo that would actually help reducing nicotine intake.
The 20mg ones are nic salts which work a bit differently which is why they're stronger. The refillable "freebase juice" is what came in 3, 6, 12mg and it sounds like it's getting banned. Nic salt is supposed to be used at much lower wattage so that you get less with each puff but it works faster (similar to a cigarette). Pretty much all the disposables use nic salts.
They need to side with the companies on this. The FDA fucked things up royally to crush the industry.
Edit: if anyone wants to know how they did this, it's because of the Premarket Tobacco Product Applicatios (PMTA) process.
Basically, for every single SKU you made, you had to submit the application which costs about $250k minimum. This means that if you have a line of 10 flavors in 4 different nicotine strengths, you'd need 40 applications. Their guidelines for the applications were also super vague, basically guaranteeing they could deny all of them.
And that's just the most egregious thing they did. They also labeled anything relating to vaping a tobacco product, including wire and batteries. Which would also be subject to the PMTA process.
Yep, the ecig industry has helped a epic amount of people quit smoking and fewer people to just vape vs picking up smoking cigs. It's insane how against the grain regulators went with this.
It's because they weren't subject to the tobacco tax that cigarette companies must pay due to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). Now the vaping industry is all but decimated outside of disposables, but you can still go buy your favorite cigarettes at any corner store.
Yup, it was all about the taxes. If you look at basically any study on vapes that has come out of the US, the methodology is designed to produce negative results.
If the FDA cared about public health they would have actually regulated the market, instead of guaranteeing the market was flooded by sketchy Chinese disposables which generate a shit ton of dangerous and hazardous waste.
They would also ban cigarettes if they actually cared.
