An FDA Deadline For Vape Shops Is Today



Most vape shops might end up being, well, vaporized following the passing of an FDA deadline on Wednesday for legalizing some 400 million varieties of nicotine-laced liquids nationwide.To get more news about vape manufacturers, you can visit univapo official website.

Vaping liquids have long been sold in a legal gray zone, placed under FDA regulation only four years ago. But under an April federal court order in an American Academy of Pediatrics lawsuit, vape shops and manufacturers were required to file FDA “premarket review” applications for vaping flavors, proving they benefit public health, by Sept. 9.
Once an application is sent to the FDA, the maker is allowed to sell the flavor for a year, unless the agency takes action. So far, Philip Morris’s heated tobacco device IQOS and Snus from Swedish Match are the only two tobacco products to have received such approval. Juul, which in 2017 was the largest e-cigarette company in the US, submitted its application in July.

But unlike those large firms, the vast majority of vape shop owners and manufacturers see themselves as caught in the crossfire because they can’t afford to submit the lengthy, costly applications. These businesses, which number about 13,000 nationwide, largely sell liquids that are meant to be added to vaping pens and other devices.

Nobody knows exactly what happens after Wednesday. Many stores might go on quietly selling vapes unless or until the FDA or local health agencies act on complaints, since the agency in January indicated it would instead prioritize policing vaping products aimed at teens. The COVID-19 pandemic has also put vape shop inspections on hold, according to the agency.

The industry says the deadline, already delayed once in May by the pandemic, will drive many vape shops out of business and send smokers back to more harmful cigarettes. But health organizations that are suspicious that vaping is hooking teens on nicotine, and fueling future tobacco smoking, call the move long overdue.The whole thing will leave the industry in never-never land, with the FDA saying everything will be on a case-by-case basis,” Mark Anton of the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association, which represents vape shops, told BuzzFeed News. In the long run, though, he argued it will be impossible to get a loan or sign a lease under threat of legal action, which will lead to stores closing. “I worry it will be Armageddon for the vaping industry.”

In 2018, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine review found that vaping can lead to future tobacco smoking in teens and also help adults kick the habit. This combustible mixture of benefits and harms — while clearly posing less of a health risk than cigarettes, which cause some 480,000 deaths a year in the US — has been at the center of the long-running fight over whether vaping’s threat to kids outweighs its help to adult former smokers.