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The ban would not apply to flavored liquids sold in adult-only vape shops.
The Trump administration on Thursday said it will effectively ban all flavors of vaping cartridges except menthol and tobacco flavors, a step back from previous plans to ban all flavors in an effort to stem rising rates of youth nicotine use attributed partly to their appeal.
President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced in September that the administration would ban all flavored vaping products, saying the country needed “strong rules and regulations” to make them less appealing to teens.
But Thursday’s announcement took a significant step back from the full ban proposed last year. The administration will move to remove from the market one-time use flavored pods used in e-cigarettes like Juul that are popular among young people. The new policy will not target vaping liquids used in other models to be sold in adult-only vape shops.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said all e-cigarette products currently on the market are illegal because they haven’t applied for approval through proper FDA channels. He said the agency allowed them to be sold to see if they could serve as an effective “off-ramp” for adults addicted to combustible cigarettes but the concern about increasing rates of young people using e-cigarettes has grown enough to warrant more restrictions.
“We believe that remains a possibility. But e-cigarettes as an off-ramp from addiction must not come at the expense of these cigarette becoming an on-ramp for addiction for a new generation of children, which is what is occurring today,” Azar said on a call with reporters.
“We are temporarily taking certain illegal products off the market if they are the types of products and flavors most widely used by kids,” he added.
In remarks to reporters earlier this week, Trump said the announcement would protect families and children from potential harm related to vaping or nicotine addiction but would also protect the vaping industry. Trump also indicated that the ban could be temporary while the Food and Drug Administration reviews applications to allow vaping and e-cigarette products back on the market.
“We think we’re going to get it back onto the market very, very quickly, but we have to protect the children. We have to protect the families. At the same time, we have a very big industry. It’s become a very big industry. We’re going to take care of the industry,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night.
At the time Trump also said that people have died from vaping, presumably a reference to vaping-related lung injuries. But Azar reiterated Thursday that the Centers for Disease Control found most of those illnesses were cases where people used e-cigarettes with THC adulterated with vitamin E acetate, which can damage the lungs when inhaled, and are not attributed to the products that would be affected by the new policy.
The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a prominent anti-tobacco use advocacy group, quickly criticized the announcement saying that leaving menthol flavors on the market will make the policy less effective in stemming the rates of young people using the products.
“Rather than clear the market of all flavored e-cigarettes, as the Administration promised to do in September, the new policy allows menthol flavored e-cigarettes and flavored liquids in every imaginable flavor to remain widely available — and kids no doubt will be able to get their hands on them,” the campaign’s president Matt Myers said in a statement.
Myers argued that teenagers will shift to using menthol flavors if others aren’t available and that companies could reclassify sweeter mint flavors as menthol to avoid the ban.
Administration officials said they chose to exempt menthol and tobacco flavors after surveys showed they were unpopular among younger users. But Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA Center for Tobacco Products, said the agency would act against companies that try to relabel mint products as menthol.
“If there was evidence they were just doing that to evade this policy we would be in position to take enforcement action,” Zeller told reporters.
FDA enforcement actions can include warning letters, seizing property, fines, or criminal prosecution.
The largest and most popular company among teenagers, Juul, already pulled flavored products from the market earlier this year but other companies still sell similar flavored products.
Under federal tobacco laws the FDA has the authority to evaluate new tobacco products and determine if they have a public health role as an alternative to cigarettes or should be subject to restrictions in where they can be sold or advertised. Tobacco companies and e-cigarette manufacturers have until May of this year to submit applications to have their products approved by FDA.
Thursday’s announcement comes weeks after the president and Congress moved to raise the legal age to purchase tobacco products to 21.
