Posted on 05/07/2016 5:21:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Food and Drug Administration this week came out with regulations that will force e-cigarette and vaping manufacturers to go through the same onerous process to qualify what they sell as "tobacco products" - despite not having one iota of tobacco involved.
There's only one conclusion to draw here: the FDA doesn't care about public health.
"Vaping" is seen by government health nannies as yet another sinful behavior that irresponsible Americans are participating in when they could be eating kale salads instead. But that takes a fundamentally misguided point of view on the subject. What vaping really constitutes is a tobacco alternative that has enabled millions of smokers to wean themselves off of a harmful habit.
The new FDA regulations will require vaping companies to complete application requirements that will take more than 5,000 hours to complete and will cost over $300,000 for each product, according to the Wall Street Journal. This is incredibly onerous for smaller vaping companies – the exact ones that have pioneered the radical innovation and competition and allowed the industry to flourish – while giving the huge tobacco companies a leg up for their own vape products. (Not to mention that smaller numbers of vapers likely means larger numbers of smokers of traditional tobacco products.)
The right way to think of vaping is as a quitting mechanism. Yes, in a vacuum, vaping is more harmful than complete abstinence. But studies have shown - over and over again - that it's much less harmful than smoking traditional tobacco products. Many have been able to make the transition away from smoking tobacco to vaping, and to good results.
Indeed, the new FDA regulations fly in the face of a report out of the U.K. Last week. The study suggested, explicitly, that tobacco users switch to vaping products in order to reduce the harm to themselves.
The Royal College of Physicians reviewed the literature on the potential costs and benefits of vaping, and came to a conclusion that the FDA would have been wise to heed. “The RCP believes that e-cigarettes could lead to significant falls in the prevalence of smoking.. prevent many deaths and episodes of serious illness, and help to reduce the social inequalities in health that tobacco smoking currently exacerbates.”
Anecdotally, I've seen this to be the case. I know friends who tried to quit smoking for years, using all different kinds of methods – therapy, patches, gum, everything available – but were only able to succeed at quitting when they were able to make the switch to e-cigarettes.
What the nannies and the neo-prohibitionists at the FDA are concerned about is people picking up vaping out of the blue. That perhaps there's a teenager who doesn't smoke and would never smoke who picks up vaping, which is on net potentially more unhealthy than doing nothing. Indeed, vaping is on the rise among teenagers, even among those who don't smoke.
The only problem with this concern is that there's no data to support it. As the New York Times wrote, “worries about [vaping] – including that using them will lead young people to eventually start smoking traditional cigarettes — have not come to pass.”
The FDA as an organization has consistently erred on the side of caution and a harmful status quo. From slow-rolling drug approval to the urge to regulate first, the FDA sees itself not as merely an
The FDA's alarmism is unfortunately going to push more people into smoking rather than letting this encouraging trend to continue. Unfortunately for Americans, the health nannies at the FDA take a regulate-first ask-questions-later approach, specifically refusing to focus on the good of harm reduction that the vaping habit has enabled. The FDA thinks that the choice is between vaping and nothing, when what's actually happening is that the FDA is choosing smoking over vaping.
*NS = Nanny-Statists
Note, the same edict prohibits by onerous taxation the availability of premium cigars. There is a trapdoor. These regs are not to be enforced for 2 years. Perhaps, just perhaps, a Trump presidency will bring common sense to the FDA.
I was thinking one afternoon this week about how much the nanny state PC crowd resembles the Victorians. That didn’t end so well for Britain.
I suspicion it, rather, has to do with all that money not being spent tobacco - and the cozy relationship between tobacco and Washington
If this is so, then vapes would seem to need no more oversight than something like Nicorette.
What makes a cigar premium for this purpose — just calling it premium? Its size? Its construction?
There is a strong case to be made for regulatory standards for vaping products. I’ve heard of a handful of explosions caused by faulty vapes—in one case, a teen was permanently blinded. There is also inconsistency between the quantity and quality of ingredients in vaping products.
To my mind, this is no different than the regulatory standards set in place for almost any other product. If you buy a product, you have the right for it to be safe and standardized. This is a different issue than the fact that studies so far do show that vaping is less harmful than smoking.
I went from a pack+ per day on regular smokes to 4 refill cartridges per week. Ten bucks a week versus five a day - you can bet the tobacco companies are seeing it.
And yet there is also mission creep. Is there nothing now that states what, say, the nicotine content of a vape should be, or what else is permitted to be in a vape?
That said, if the major domestic tobacco companies were producing vapes, they probably would be more consistent and better quality than the frequently China produced products we now have, if more costly too.
Ridiculous! All done to build bureaucratic empires and to provide cover stories that useless eater Federales are not useless. That these are uber-important regulatory jobs that need to be filled by affirmative action (gays, blacks, lezzies, trannies, feminazis etc etc) drones and other style drones.
Just think of the Washington DC region Federal government as a glorified employment agency for socialists and liberals who are not hetero, white and male
I do not think there is, and I am not surprised by the move to regulate it. I've actually been expecting the FDA to step in at some point. There is nothing wrong with making sure a product conforms to standards--that its nicotine content falls within a specific range, that its flavorings conform to food industry standards, that it uses water of a specific purity, that its mechanical components are not prone to injury-causing failure, etc.
Your point about mission creep is a valid one. While there is a strong case to be made for the FDA in its role of enforcing product safety standards, there is not a case to be made for it to attempt to control consumer use of such products. Unfortunately, liberal politicians see the FDA as a tool for enforcing lifestyle decisions on the public (e.g. your food and beverage choices)--and the public, seeing the FDA used in this way, concludes incorrectly that the FDA has no legitimate purpose.
Not so much “sinful behaviour” as competition for cigarettes which threatens the huge taxes raked off the sale of those cigarettes.
Can you point out the enumerated power that the States gave to the national government to assume that role?
Imagine Fed Gov collectively $hitting its pants if only 10% of smokers suddenly quit.
The FDA has its power to regulate consumer products under two provisions of the Constitution: the general welfare clause (since product safety is directly related to well-being, in that a product defect should not disable, poison, kill, or otherwise harm a person).
Article I, section 8 of the U. S. Constitution grants Congress the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defense and general Welfare of the United States."
...and the commerce clause, since very few products are produced and consumed within a single state and no other.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 states that the United States Congress shall have power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."
I think that many, if not most, states have product regulatory agencies. All that would happen if the FDA were disbanded as some people advocate is that each state would then regulate each product separately, leading to a plethora of regulations, many of them contradictory and incompatible with each other. The costs of complying with 50 different regulatory systems would cause product prices to skyrocket for any industry that wanted to sell its product across state lines.
Note that none of the Constitutional authority for the FDA to perform regulatory functions according to its charter apply to use of the FDA to try to control behavior. For instance, the FDA can tell a soda company that its product must adhere to certain safety standards, but it cannot control consumer use of the product. It is your choice, as a consumer, to consume that soda. It is the FDA's job to ensure that it is made from clean water and not contaminated with bacteria.
I occasionally vape nicotine.
Most of the explosions are from cheap stand-alones (ie: battery & cartridge purchased as a single unit that cannot be separated). Many, if not all of the stories I have read closely mention the victim carried a lithium ion battery product loose in a pocket with keys and change, that is: metallic objects.
Another mistake is to drag heavily and repeatedly on the unit within a short time period. Anyone using a vaporizer notices this makes the battery unit heat up. When this happens, it is a good idea to unscrew the cartridge from the battery and let them cool down separately for a while, NOT shove them into a pocket or purse with loose metallic objects.
A third error is to fool around inside the vaporizer to change the voltage, the gap between the heated prongs that do the actual vaporizing or the percentage of ingredients in the cartridge.
I use a case with separate storage for a connected unit (battery and cartridge), plus a charging station for a second battery. The case indicates number of charges left and if the charger is working. The empty case can be separately recharged when necessary. I would never recharge the case while a battery is inserted into the internal charging station. It holds a charge, as does the extra battery, for weeks if I only use it when in a no smoking environment. If I use it continually, as I would cigarettes,it still holds a charge for several days, maybe up to a week with two interchangeable batteries.
Common sense and a commitment to purchasing a more sophisticated device would obviate many of these explosions. Lithium ion powered laptops explode, as well.Many of these dangers are explicitly noted on the labels. The units I have used have detailed operating instructions. Some have UL ratings. The ones I have used list percentages of available nicotine, but heavy tokes within a short time can change the delivered dosage, which, of course, if why some people misuse the devices and try to substitute altered dosing.
Media misleads when one has to read closely through several sensationalized paragraphs to discover user fault in most of the reported explosions. Vaporizers are electronic devices and should be treated with the same caution as any other electronic device. I suspect these same people misuse their phones and laptops or never read operating instructions on anything. Responsibility lies with users as well as manufacturers.
That said, everything available in the marketplace exists on a quality spectrum. There are cheap, poorly-made versions of everything. There are imports of dubious quality. Much responsibility lies with users to exercise discernment.
Nanny government will exploit stupidity to institute regulations every time it can. Education of users would go a long way to solve the problems without egregious one-size-suffocates-all regulation.
a premium cigar is hand rolled, not machined, and contains specially selected and limited blends of tobacco and wrappers. Cost is $10 - $25 per stick with some higher and some a bit lower.
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