America’s Blinkered Battle
The United States is continuing to chip away at the remaining tobacco harm reduction products on the shelves with a recent decision leaving Imperial Brands feeling blue
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by Dave Cross
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The conflation of vaping with smoking allows bigots and prohibitionists incorrectly to paint electronic cigarettes as containing child-friendly flavours and be a tobacco industry product geared towards the ensnaring of teens through irresponsible branding and marketing practises.
With most flavours not being granted market access by the Food and Drug Administration, misinformed campaigners, liars, and Bloomberg-funded interests are now turning their sights on to menthol.
The blinkered American Cancer Society and the irresponsible American Heart Association issued a joint statement, saying: “Leaving menthol flavoured e-cigarettes widely available and completely exempting liquid flavoured products is a capitulation to Big Tobacco and vape shops and gives a green light to the e-cigarette industry to continue to target and addict kids with flavoured products.”
Some commentators previously expressed the opinion that the tobacco industry wasn’t fighting American flavour bans because they saw it as a method of clearing out the majority of the independent companies from the marketplace – with no decent juices remaining, the value of mods and attys are reduced and more people would switch to Big Tobacco pods and disposables.
The tobacco industry failed to flex its financial might with legal challenges and may now be regretting the short-sighted decision as news broke last week that Imperial Brands’ myblu line received several marketing denial orders for products in the line-up.
The Food and Drug Administration said that Imperial Brands, “did not demonstrate that the potential benefit to smokers who switch completely or significantly reduce their cigarette use would outweigh the risk to youth,” continuing by saying that the denial order moved the nation, “one step closer toward ensuring all deemed new tobacco products have undergone science-based review and received marketing authorisation by the FDA before they can be legally marketed”.
Independent companies stated that the process to apply for permission to sell products in the States was laborious, paperwork driven, and exceptionally costly. It is clear that when a company with the financial clout of Imperial Brands can’t manage to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s that the entire process is corrupt and geared to failure.
The Food and Drug Administration’s denial leaves the tobacco industry with a huge dilemma as the companies have been gearing up to switch away from tobacco products to safter novel nicotine alternatives such as vapes.
Imperial Brands will now appeal the Food and Drug Administration’s decision and with so much to potentially lose, it is expected they will throw a huge effort into pulling apart the Administration’s decision-making process.
American Vaping Association’s Greg Conley spoke in response to the decision, saying that he doubts the Food and Drug Administration will ever be able to regulate the vape market responsibly.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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