The Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a challenge to a California law that bans the sale of flavored cigarettes, leaving the state law in place.
Tobacco manufacturers and retailers, including R.J. Reynolds, argued the state law conflicts with the federal Tobacco Control Act, which gives the US Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate the sale of cigarettes, but stops short of allowing states to outright ban certain products as they see fit.
“Under the TCA, states have broad authority to regulate the sale of tobacco products. They can raise the minimum purchase age, restrict sales to particular times and locations, and enforce licensing regimes,” attorneys for the challengers told the justices in court papers. “But one thing they cannot do is completely prohibit the sale of those products for failing to meet the state’s preferred tobacco product standards.”
The court declined to hear the case without comment.
Uh… It’s kinda a long story…
Vaping started with e-cigarettes, they looked like cigarettes and tried to taste like cigarettes. Mostly it was Blu, which was a commercially advertised version, but you could get better ones if you looked. They were basically a smoking cessation device, gum/patches, but with the form factor, look, and sorta the feel of smoking.
Being a cessation aid, they were priced pretty heavy… And people like me started getting into reverse engineering them (I have 510 sized taps and dies, and various other tools I’ve made over the years as this progressed). people started using much bigger batteries, people came up with drippers, it’s essentially just a lithium battery with a piece of resistance wire, you can easily make a vape, the term “mod” came about because we were modifying things to use as vapes, flashlights, Hammond project boxes, altoid tins…
Meanwhile, it’s all gaining traction, jenny mcarthy and Stephen dorff are all over the TV telling people it’s just water vapor (incorrect, it’s theatrical fog really) and to “take back their freedom”, Blu got popular, and modders started getting serious and mods got commercialized.
Then bada-boom, vape shops started popping up everywhere… We’d sorted out that vape juice is two alcohols used in fog machines, a flavor (like loranns candy flavors, I used those early on because they’re easy to find), and nicotine (liquid, if you bring a pack of dentine to my house I can turn it into nicotine gum at whatever dose you like in seconds, nicorette is robbing motherfuckers blind). Literally anyone can mix up ejuice, and that was what drove the vape shop boom.
During that time, smoking took a dive. A big one. States get a check every year from tobacco companies, based on sales in the state. It’s ostensibly to pay for the damages done to smokers… And the checks, based on sales, also took a dive. There was also a dent in the sin taxes.
So the FDA jumps in, the NHS in UK takes notice (because less smokers means less public money spent on healthcare), and the FDA immediately says you can’t call e-cigarettes a smoking cessation aid, and the UK decides vapes are 90+% safer yhan smoking and starts prescribng vapes for free…
Fast forward through a decade of propaganda, and it’s “think of the children” and ban vapes… Ban ban ban… Evil bad vapes…
I can’t tell you as an absolute fact that the disparity between the UK NHS recommending vapes, and the US banning them is because the UK saves money if people don’t smoke, and the states lose money if people don’t smoke, but I told you the story of how we got to this point, an I’ll let you do the math :)
This isn’t about menthol IMHO, because of the lack of specificity… They just ninja banned vaping. Cigarette flavored vapes are flavored “tobacco products” (because the FDA says so… Literally). They’ll ease it in there, but I’m pretty sure this ban was the goalpost, and personally, I think it constitutes death warrants in the interest of their budget…
Great write up, very informative.
I’m currently visiting Japan, and everyone has these cigarette heaters which is a mod type device with a heating element that you put a tiny cig into, I wonder if/when that’s going to hit the US.
I don’t have all the info but some of them are called iqos
The US is usually 5-10 years behind Japan, but vaping has taken hold in the US youth. I expect legislation to keep cutting down on vape sales by restricting flavors to push people towards tobacco and secondary flavor additives as an additional cost and inconvenience.
Tobacco companies got the FDAs blessing on some of those already. Some as far back as 2018.
As for why they aren’t on the market, I dunno. Could be they aren’t as profitable (they certainly would cost more to produce), could be they dont see any need to compete with their own products, and if you’re a tinfoil hat type, could be those heat-not-burn products aren’t addictive enough.