News

Last week, while the city of New York debated adding e-cigarettes to the Clean Indoor Air Act, Los Angeles voted on a motion to draft an ordinance regulating usage of the devices wherever smoking is prohibited.

A news story about a kid purchasing an e-cigarette is bound to get those opposed to the technology up in arms, and a recent story from British Columbia drives that fact home very clearly indeed.

With harsh e-cig regulations in the pipeline in Washington state, Mt. Baker Vapor has opted to cull a large number of e-liquid flavors, in case each flavor will need to be individually certified for sale. With 190 flavors on the chopping block, it’s a firm reminder of the impact irrational legislation can have on vapers and the companies that supply us.

It's been jam-packed with research this week, from studies leading to claims that vaping will cause lung cancer to ones finding little to no risk of passive vaping, but there's also been the usual selection of new pieces of legislation, excellent blog posts from the community and some serious nonsense spouted about e-cigs. It's the Week in Vaping.

After a great deal of controversy over the last time Five Pawns’ juices were tested, the company has now released new test results. The findings – which in the previous test showed up to 2,500 ppm (or 2,500 μg/ml) of acetyl propionyl (AP) in Absolute Pin – now show vastly lower levels of the chemical. So what’s going on?

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is losing sales of its nicotine patches and gums because of the proliferation of e-cigarettes, according to the company’s chief executive. Andrew Witty commented, “Of course, it's definitely taken a bit of our market, no question at all," but said they won't release their own because e-cigs are "just too controversial."

The Welsh government has announced that it will ban vaping in enclosed public places under a new public health law, igniting much debate about the pros and cons of such a decision. It's argued that vaping could pose a health risk to bystanders and may re-normalize smoking, but are these concerns justified?

In a disarmingly rational decision, lawmakers in North Dakota have passed a bill that both bans the sale and use of e-cigarettes by minors and classifies them as non-tobacco products. Instead, they passed another bill classifying e-cigarettes as “nicotine devices.”

We interviewed Prof. Jean-Françios Etter about a new study which looked at the long-term behavior of vapers.

We’ve written a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg – who has already received a “protect the children” call from the Attorneys General – putting forward the case for e-cigarettes and suggesting how they should be regulated.

It’s time for the Week in Vaping. This week, flavors are luring teens into vaping (they aren’t), vaping impedes quitting (it doesn’t), indoor vaping bans are necessary for public health (they aren’t) and Public Health England were just hypnotized by the tobacco industry into saying e-cigarettes are much safer than cigarettes (of course!).

As everyone has heard by now, the FDA’s disastrous proposal to regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products has gone ahead with none of the changes vaping advocates may have been hoping for. We wanted continued innovation with improved product standards; we got thinly-veiled prohibition.

The FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products has announced it will be holding a public listening session to discuss “any topic relevant to science-based regulation of tobacco products” on April 5th in San Diego.

Health authorities in Mexico have closed down two vape stores in Mexico City, seizing almost 9,500 devices and citing the technical illegality of e-cigarettes in the country. For the two years prior to this seizure, only around 2,200 devices had been seized, and this may be an indication that authorities are planning on stepping up activity against vaping.

Another week, and more of the usual in the world of vaping. People overestimate the risks of e-cigarettes, moves to ban indoor vaping continue in many localities and even in public housing units, misused mechanical mods explode, countries grapple with how to regulate e-cigs and the onslaught of anti-vaping nonsense continues.

With yet more bans on indoor vaping, anti-THR research, a litany of litigation, more “think of the children” nonsense designed to drum up support for restrictions on vaping and public health advocates starting to wonder how they should reconcile their evidence-free opposition to vaping with the growing body of evidence that it’s much safer than smoking, it’s the Week in Vaping.

After the landmark decision from the European Parliament to not regulate e-cigs as medicines, the EU Commission – the arm of the EU responsible for proposing legislation – has pushed ahead and proposed a vastly disproportionate approach to regulating e-cigs.