On May 6th, 2016 FDA released its deeming regulations for the Electronic Cigarette Industry. The regulations were extreme and if nothing gets changed will mostly kill the E-Cig industry. The regulations were completely in favor of big tobacco companies who are the only companies that could go through expensive but illogical process. Killing of E-cig industry would have too many bad consequences, such as:
- Many people will go back to regular smoking
- Even 0mg (no nicotine) options won’t be available for people
- Thousands of small businesses will go out of business across the country
- Hundreds of thousands of people will have to look for another job as these businesses will be shut down
It seemed that politics and money played a big role in getting these regulations published and the only winners are the large tobacco companies.
Fortunately, few organizations such as: American Vaping Association, SFATA, Tobacco Merchants Association, Vapor Technology Association, and CASAA are trying the save the vaping industry. They are trying to get the predicate date for vapor products moved from Feb’ 2007 to August (or December) 2016. Modernizing the predicate date will help stop the ban of 99%-plus of products on the market today.
The industry and consumers need to put forth a massive effort to ensure that both Democrats and Republicans do not lose sight of the importance of this policy change. Recently, the House Appropriations Committee voted in favor of an amendment to the FY 2017 Agriculture Appropriation bill but nothing is decided yet. The fate of the US Vapor industry is in the hands of Congress.
Magic mist also requests you to please contact your senators and Congress members and urge them to push forward the FY2017 Agriculture Appropriations bill. This bill would modernize the predicate date for vapor products and stop the FDA from banning 99%-plus vapor products on market today.
Interestingly, just 2 months ago, a 200 page report by by UK Royal College of Physicians concluded:
“Large-scale substitution of e-cigarettes for tobacco smoking has the potential to prevent almost all the harm from smoking in society,” the RCP says. “Promoting e-cigarettes…and other non-tobacco nicotine products as widely as possible, as a substitute for smoking, is therefore likely to generate significant health gains in the UK.”
All of us need to contact our senators and district congress members to tell them about our own story and how important it is for you that you continue to vape rather than smoke, and how vaping has helped you in general. The more customer stories these congress members hear from their citizens, the more they will take this matter seriously.