Illicit e-cigarette stores flood stores as F.D.A. Struggles to combat imports

Certain vapes appear with increasing nicotine levels which approach those of a carton of cigarettes. American regulators have not authorized them, but have failed to keep them off the shelves.

Juul was once the cool vape, accused of having hooked adolescents to electronic cigarettes, and this is the case today. willing to pay billions of dollars in legal settlements.

Then came the Puff Bar, which was popular in high schools until federal authorities began to grab these vapes. Elf Bar intervened and its products were seized at the border. A parade of facsimiles arrives right behind them: Virtue Bar, Juicy Bar, Lost Mary, Lost Vape and many others.

The latest flood of illicit e-cigarettes arrived from China in Barbiecore colors and fruit, ice cream and slushy flavors, and represents a significant share of the estimated $5.5 billion U.S. e-cigarette market.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0"> The relentless influx of vapes, some offering 5,000 or more puffs per device or escalating nicotine levels, has exposed a gaping gap in Food and Drug enforcement Administration, which has only authorized a handful of the hundreds of options that line convenience stores. walls nationwide. Members of Congress, two dozen state attorneys general and even big tobacco companies have stepped up calls for the agency to bring the situation under control.

Agreed, the latest appeals by the tobacco industry are seen by anti-tobacco groups as a laudable effort to lock in market share, but others interpret the addition of these strange bedfellows as a sign of a market gone crazy.

The FDA. “has been faced with a very difficult situation, much of which involves putting the genie — or putting the genie — back in the bottle,” said Erika Sward, assistant vice president of advocacy for the American Lung Association. "And I don't envy them for that."

Agency officials said they used every tool in their power to crack down on illegal the law of electronic cigarettes. Yet the agency's recent fines totaled about $19,000 per violation and largely targeted a few products sold in each store. The agency's orders asking six manufacturers to stop selling certain products were directed at U.S. stores, some of which were in small towns.

And although the F.D.A. has sent hundreds of warning letters, the effect is barely being felt: sales of flavored vapes have jumped 60% over the past three years, reaching 18 million vaping products per month in June, up from 11 million per month at the start of 2020, according to the C.D.C. Foundation.

“The F.D.A. We should not have flavored e-cigarettes like this on the market,” said Yolonda Richardson, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “And so it just has to do its job.”

When the F.D.A. was given expanded authority to regulate e-cigarettes in 2016, the goal was to chart a new course in public health: smokers would have an alternative to traditional cigarettes and underage tobacco use would remain at historically low levels .

Seven years later, nearly 40% of e-cigarette users are 25 or younger, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And of the approximately 2,000 vaping and electronic cigarette products on the market, the agency has only given the green light to around twenty of them, and it still faces a backlog of requests, according to an industry study.

There are few places where the problem seems more pressing than in high school bathrooms, where students crowd between classes to get a nicotine fix .