I've evaluated situations like this longer than many of ECF's member have been on this planet. They all have the same heartbeat. I've read this and other "action" threads. Despite the apparent effort that went into them, you folks have made lots of amateurish mistakes. Some of the suggested courses of action, and suggested communications to legislators, were so counterproductive that the authors would have been fired immediately from nearly any minimally reputable law or PR firm. Do yourselves a favor. Re-read
SOTTERA, INC. v. FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION.-.Argued September 23, 2010. Stop making therapeutic claims, particularly if you are directly or indirectly associated with any seller, distributor or manufacturer, lest you end up causing them to fall under FDCA. Also stop exaggerating the effect of
SOTTERA, INC. v. FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION.-.Argued September 23, 2010. In that case, the Federal DC Circuit Court of Appeals merely affirmed a Federal District Court (trial level) ruling that the FDA cannot regulate under the FDCA (a very onerous regimen) any particular e-cig maker, distributor or seller in the absence of associated therapeutic claims. However, that case does contains strong judicial encouragement for pursuing regulations/action under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (the "Act"). As you may know, Federal Courts generally do not adjudicate hypothetical cases due to Art. III of the US Constitution (the actual "controversy or requirement"). Inasmuch as action under the Act and related, developed regulations were not then before them, the case was not decided on that basis. That which is down the road, however, is fairly obvious. There really is not much room for future optimism in certain, but not all, e-cig-related areas. There will be substantially more regulation and a significant chance that various nic flavored juiced will be banned. The model is already there in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, both in the actual terms of the law and its underlying congressional findings. (It is the law that deprived me of buying precious Djarum Originals in the USA due to explicit gateway concerns regarding kids.) Your only hope at the national level, which is where this is going to be decided in short order, is as I have laid out. You need professional PR, a top shelf firm both for alternative legislative suggestions/regulatory guidelines and for litigation (if necessary and prudent), lobbyists, targeted campaign contributions, and clean non-juvenile-appealing advertising. (Juvenile advertising with the standard disclaimer is very counterproductive.) If you don't yet have a strong trade association to fund it, then you are going to have to rely on the manufacturers. I leave you with a bit of classical wisdom: "Hope, danger's comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colours only when they are ruined; but so long as the discovery would enable them to guard against it, it is never found wanting. Let not this be the case with you, who are weak and hang on a single turn of the scale; nor be like the vulgar, who, abandoning such security as human means may still afford, when visible hopes fail them in extremity, turn to invisible, to prophecies and oracles, and other such inventions that delude men with hopes to their destruction."
Julie keeps us informed as to what is going on in the legal arena, we have grown rather fond of her. As for you, I don't know you and I can honestly say that I don't want to either.
