Most convenience stores feature rows of colorful vapes promising tastes of cotton candy or iced mango, but none of them should be there. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized 34 electronic cigarette products. Four menthol vapes are the only flavored products on the list. The fruity-flavored e-cigarettes are all illegal.
What’s the solution? A new paper from representatives of Rutgers Health and New York City advocates a barrage of state and local lawsuits against distributors. “The FDA is trying to regulate cigarettes like pharmaceuticals, and it lacks the resources to make it work,” said Kevin Schroth, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and lead author of the BMJ Tobacco Control article.
Schroth and his co-author, New York litigator Eric Proshansky, lay out a vape-control plan that echoes the 1998 master settlement with big tobacco: Instead of aiming for overseas factories or the corner stores, state and local lawsuits should target domestic distributors, which bridge Chinese assembly lines and American cash registers. “Distributors are the bottleneck,” said Schroth, who holds appointments at the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies and the Rutgers Brain Health Institute. “There are thousands of stores but only a handful of companies moving the product around.” To read the full story.