hey guys, i have been vaping for a while now, but i really dont know what going on with the FDA and ecigs. Anyways I was at a local store and the guy said to the best of his knowledge that the FDA no long has any say on ecig products and that the study they published a year ago was invalid?
Can someone tell me whats up wiht ecigs and the FDA. i.e. should ecigs be FDA approved to be for sale?
Electronic cigarettes are legal and always have been (and we now know they probably always will be).
Because the FDA derives their funding from the pharmaceutical industry, they tend to follow the pharma industry's agenda most of the time. This conflicts strongly with their duty to manage public health issues. The pharma industry will suffer badly financially from the growing use of e-cigarettes because less people - and eventually very few people indeed - will buy NRTs, which is the generic term for quit-smoking drugs. As a result the FDA tried their best to ban e-cigarettes by attempting to classify them as drugs, which would have meant that 99.99% of products would have been removed from the market. To begin this process they tried to prevent imports. Two e-cigarette companies challenged them in court and won. They won two later appeals, which halted the FDA's plans.
Because this route failed, the FDA needs to find a new way to attempt to limit sales of e-cigarettes as this is what they are required to do by their sources of funding (public health or logic are not relevant here). As the courts decided that e-cigarette products are tobacco products, this means that the FDA must now attempt to restrict sales by introducing regulations that make them less attractive to buyers.
We have about a year or so before regulations filter down into the market, assuming that such regulations are not blocked by further legal action against the FDA, as seems possible. First the FDA must propose regulations, then they must 'listen' to stakeholders, then they can apply them. Unless the regulations are opposed we can expect them to become stricter and stricter, with the ultimate aim of reducing e-cigarette sales to the benefit of the pharma industry.
However it is likely that, since the courts seem less vulnerable to the pressures that have completely taken over the FDA, any new regulations will have a tough path to acceptance. Worst case: everything you like about e-cigarettes will be regulated away. Best case: they won't get away with anything at all. The end result is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
But there is a long way to go before this impacts us, at this time. The import and use of e-cigarettes is now enshrined in law. It is beyond doubt that some form of taxation will be introduced at some stage, if only due to pressure by government treasury departments. At the current rate of market penetration e-cigarette users will comprise 25% of smokers (i.e., there will be 25% less tobacco smokers) by 2025 and possibly even by 2020. You must be able to see that a loss of 25% of the vast sums brought in by tobacco tax will not go unchallenged.
As regards health implications - nobody knows at this time. The truth is that they cannot be absolutely safe, as some people (especially those with pre-existing medical conditions) will prove intolerant to e-cigarette use and some morbidity (illness) and even mortality (death) is likely to occur, but on a small scale as far as we can see. It's also true that their use must be hundreds of times safer than smoking tobacco.
Unless you have a pre-existing lung disease, or are pregnant, there doesn't seem, at this time, to be much in the way of contra-indications. Together with the fact that the FDA took a beating and need to regroup, it means that things will continue as they are for a year or so.
In terms of sensible regulation, and quality control, that is something that ideally should be addressed by the electronic cigarette industry. The less they do in this regard, the more force the FDA's argument that government regulation is needed will have. Every month the industry does nothing about this is a month closer to FDA regulations that cannot be logically opposed, since somebody somewhere needs to be looking at these issues. Indeed there is a strong argument that if a robust and effective trade association with regulations in place had been in existence at the time of Judge Leon's verdict, he might just have decided not to classify e-cigs as a tobacco product.
Like anybody else with more than three brain cells, he could see that somebody needs to be looking at quality controls for a product that millions of people will be inhaling for a lifetime.
