FDA bans menthol cigarettes, chips away at flavored e-cigs

FDA Commissioner Scott
Gottlieb
Reuters

• Federal regulators on Thursday announced a ban on menthol
  cigarettes and a move to place flavored e-cigarettes
  like the Juul behind a stronger regulatory fence.
• The move is less severe than what some expected to see: an
  immediate
  ban on flavored e-cigs being sold at convenience stores and
  gas stations.
• Menthol and mint e-cigarettes aren’t affected by the
  government’s proposal at all.
• Earlier this week, Silicon Valley e-cig startup
  Juul announced it would
  temporarily stop selling its
  flavored e-cigarettes in stores — a move it likely made in
  advance of the government’s latest statement.

Instead of announcing what was expected to be a sweeping and
immediate ban on
flavored e-cigs like the
Juul on Thursday, government regulators said that they would
be banning regular menthol cigarettes and revisiting a year
old-policy designed to put new e-cig products behind a stronger
regulatory fence.

In a
statement, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott
Gottlieb said his agency would revisit its policy as it applies
to all flavored e-cigs, except for tobacco, mint, and menthol
varieties. FDA didn’t provide a timeline for the changes.

The changes Gottlieb aims to see, he said, would protect teens
and minors by ensuring those products were only sold in locations
that cater exclusively to adults. Online sales would also be
allowed “under heightened practices for age verification.”

The move may surprise Juul Labs, the Silicon Valley startup that
currently captures 80% of the e-cig market.

Earlier this week, the company announced its own temporary and

immediate ban on flavored e-cigs being sold at convenience
stores, gas stations, and vape shops. Experts say the move was
likely made in advance of an
expected similar action from the FDA. Last week, the
Washington Post
reported that the agency would ban “most flavored
e-cigarettes in tens of thousands of convenience stores and gas
stations across the country.”

Juul responded with its own action that ended up being stronger
than FDA’s announcement.

“As of this morning, we stopped accepting retail orders for
our Mango, Fruit, Creme, and Cucumber Juul pods to the over
90,000 retail stores that sell our product, including traditional
tobacco retailers (e.g., convenience stores) and specialty vape
shops,” Juul CEO Kevin Burns 
said in a
statement
 on November 13.

But the FDA did not ban flavored e-cigs today.

Instead, the agency barred the sale of menthol cigarettes — which
Gottlieb said he believed “represent one of the most common and
pernicious routes by which kids initiate on combustible
cigarettes” — and outlined plans to eventually regulate e-cigs
more strongly using a policy he initially proposed last year and
then waived.

Thanks to that policy, any new e-cig introduced before August
2016 was
essentially grandfathered onto the market, meaning its
makers did not have to seek FDA approval to sell their products
until at least 2022.

That waived policy has essentially been the door through which
e-cig companies like Juul were able to aggressively market and
sell their products.

Gottlieb said he hopes that by revisiting that policy, it will
place e-cigs back behind a regulatory fence and ensure that they
are marketed and sold in a responsible manner that doesn’t target
youth.

The government is also preparing to publish new data which
suggest a troubling increase in e-cig use among teens. From 2017
to 2018, Gottlieb said, there was a 78% rise in current e-cig use
among high school students and a 48% increase among middle school
students.

“These data shock my conscience,” Gottlieb said in the statement.

“The bottom line is this: I will not allow a generation of
children to become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarettes,” he
said in the statement.