Is The FDA Right?

Electronic Cigarettes are not tobacco products.

Some vapers believe the FDA has proposed ‘light touch’ regulations while other vapers believe this is the beginning of the end. The way I look at it is this, “can we trust the FDA to do the right thing by us, the public?” I’m not arguing that there needs to be some regulation for electronic cigarettes, but no matter what we call them, eCigs, eCigarettes, whatever, they are not tobacco products, and should not be regulated as tobacco products.

Does Chantix Approval Tell Us Anything?

Consider the FDA approval of the drug Chantix, a drug that has known side effects that include psychotic breaks, suicide, murder, and plain, straight up crazy. In a supposed effort to fight addiction to smoking the FDA approved this nasty drug. Were you aware that when Chantix was before the FDA pending approval Pfizer did not have to show any studies proving the success rate of Chantix in getting people off smoking? The success rate of this horrible drug is a miserable 14%, despite the Chantix makers touting a 44% rate of success.  Does anyone know the percentage of people who were mentally assaulted by Chantix?

The FDA and Electronic Cigarettes

It’s quite another story with the FDA and eCigarettes isn’t it? With respect to vaping the FDA seems to have begun a long hard slog toward massive regulation… against a product with no known side effects. Despite no scientific evidence that even suggests eCigarettes are remotely as harmful as Chantix, let along smoking, the FDA is proceeding along a path that could eventually lead to such strict, prohibitive series of regulations that for the industry to survive outside the exclusive umbrella of big tobacco would be impossible. Especially since an electronic cigarette only has one thing in common with analog cigarettes… nicotine. But then, are nicotine patches tobacco products? Nicotine Gum?

The FDA’s proposed regulations for ecigarettes and the ease of approval for questionable drugs like Chantix raise serious issues, not only about policy corruption but also personal freedoms. Anyone who is not beginning to question the power of government to force changes upon its citizens against their will isn’t paying much attention. So, I’ll answer my own question. Can we trust the FDA? No, no we can’t.

Overreach

The FDA declaring that they can regulate eCigarettes as tobacco products is pure overreach. Reading the new FDA regulations, one of the admissions that we, and many others who have read them, like to point to is the FDA admitting that they “do not currently have sufficient data about eCigarettes and similar products to determine what effects they have on the public health.” If that is true, on what do they base their claim to regulate them as tobacco products? Should there not be evidence that the need to regulate them as a tobacco product is a clear and present danger before asserting their authority over them as a tobacco product?

If the FDA believe that they should be the ones to regulate a product that shows no signs of being harmful to anyone, how about spending some of our tax dollars and finally find out what the deal is with eCigarettes and wait until the outcome before destroying peoples lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness… not to mention a growing industry providing jobs, injecting money into communities that need it, and getting tens of thousands of people off cigarettes every month?

Be Reasonable

Not everything in the proposed regulations is bad however. It’s not even that we mind some regulation, just as long as the regulations make sense and are not written under the same conditions as a tobacco product would be. We know it is inevitable even though it goes against my Libertarian beliefs. Sometimes, just sometimes, when an industry cannot self-regulate then maybe, just maybe, the government should step in. But honestly…these regulations should not ever be under the guise of regulating a tobacco product. Still there are a couple of provisions that we believe are good, though we believe they can be handled from within.

Minors, Quality, Labels

We here at Spinfuel eMagazine do not think that stopping kids under 18 from using nicotine is bad idea, though that should be a parental responsibility, not the governments’, and we absolutely believe that eLiquid vendors must be held accountable for the ingredients they put in their juice, listing those ingredients on their labels, and even going so far as to warn the ignorant that nicotine can be addictive. A warning label is fine by us… within reason. Again, this can be accomplished from within by vapers not buying eLiquids from companies that do not have a clean mixing room, do not use proper tamper-proof bottles, do not list their ingredients, and do not submit to random testing by an outside lab.

Regulations We Cannot Agree With

We do not believe that every time an eCigarette company builds another mod that they should have to submit it to the FDA for approval as a new tobacco product. As long as it’s based on already proven practices, what purpose would it serve? When the day comes that some company invents a laser-driven vaporizer then, yes, maybe it should face some kind of approval process that can determine that its actually safe to use. But again, not as a tobacco product. I mean, seriously, consider the Innokin iTaste line as an example.

An iTaste device differs only in appearance, these days anyway, and what the FDA seems to be saying about “tobacco” hardware would mean that instead of driving the market forward with new models, new designs, new innovations, the same mod we buy today in 2014 will be what is available is 2020, unless some company wants to spend a few million bucks trying to get approval from an agency that shouldn’t even be regulating it. Is it worth the risk? A lot of models flop when they reach the market, who would want to chance it? I wonder, do companies that make tobacco pipes have to submit every new pipe to the FDA for approval?

Conclusion

At this point in time we, Spinfuel eMagazine, are not willing to acknowledge the fact that the FDA has a right to regulate eCigarettes as TOBACCO PRODUCTS.

These days everything is regulated, so we have to live with it, but, the FDA is wrong by placing eCigarettes under the same class as tobacco cigarettes. Lastly, if the FDA insists on going down this road then we can at least hope that they will not try to kill the only effective weapon in the fight to help 43 million Americans get away from smoking tobacco. And they will do just that if they hand the eCigarette industry over the an industry that has lied for decades about their own products. If they do, is it not likely that Big Tobacco will poison eLiquids with magical additives, as they did with tobacco cigarettes?

eCigarette hardware, and eLiquids, should remain firmly in the hands of owners that have quit smoking and embraced vaping. They believe in their product, they won’t whore it out for money.

John Manzione – Publisher