Last week, the founder of Bloomberg LP, a man with an estimated net worth somewhere in the region of $100 billion, sat down at a keyboard and wrote a column about flavored e-cigarettes. He is concerned that the FDA has suddenly and partially reversed its previous ban on sweet and fruity vape flavors.
He is also a bit perplexed that nine in ten teenage vapers reach for the fruity stuff, and that the tobacco industry is essentially now offering candy to children. In his own words, the government has got into bed with the predators.
To a degree, Bloomberg is not wrong about the reversal, nor is he wrong that the FDA appears to have done so without anything resembling a scientific review. But what he is probably wrong about is everything else.
The Actual Reversal
In 2020, the first Trump administration banned all flavors except menthol and tobacco, on the logic that strawberry and bubblegum were luring teenagers, and removing them would simply unlure them. In the meantime, cigarettes (which, as we are all aware, kill people in staggering numbers) remained on sale all over America. It is interesting, one might argue, that no one at the FDA seemed to find the double standards even remotely peculiar.
The ban achieved several things, collapsing the legal market for adult-friendly flavors chief among them. For all intents and purposes, they inadvertently handed the disposables business to a fleet of Chinese factories, which began shipping unregulated vapes through US customs, labeled as innocuous, commonplace imports like shoes. This explains the rather embarrassing statistic that more than half the vapes sold in America are technically illegal.
To be fair, it did reduce youth vaping somewhat, though chiefly by sending the kids who wanted flavors to the same Shenzhen warehouses the adults were now using.
But now, five years later, the FDA has reversed itself, also without a scientific review and after intense lobbying, except this time from the tobacco conglomerates who own the products that will now be authorized. So, that’s the same agency and absence of evidence, but with an entirely opposite conclusion. Bravo, all round. The audacity of it all knows no bounds.
Bloomberg’s View
When distilled, Michael Bloomberg’s argument (in a framing that is hard to argue with if you happen to be eight years old) seems to be that flavored vapes are nothing more than candy from strangers, and the only responsible, adult thing to do is take the candy away.
Adult smokers, however, are not eight years old. On average, they are deep into middle age, 30 years into a pack-a-day habit, and quite possibly a little beat up by it. When they try to quit, the thing that actually helps is a refillable vape loaded with something that does not taste like cigarettes, the very thing they are trying to escape, and the last thing they want to be reminded of. The issue is that tobacco flavor, as the name suggests, tastes like tobacco.
Britain figured this out years ago – and so they should have, because it’s an easy thing to figure out. Across the pond, strawberry, mango, blueberry, et al, are all freely available, bought overwhelmingly by adults, and, as a result, they now boast youth vaping rates far lower than America’s. The British position is that grown-ups can decide (within reason) what and how to inhale, and the data has consistently supported this stance. In fact, there are now more vapers than smokers in the UK for the first time in recorded history.
Bridge for Sale
Bloomberg closes by dismissing any suggestion that the reversal represents genuine progress, before ending with the line, “If you believe that, then I have a bridge to sell you,” which is a fun line to deploy when the man writing it happens to own most of the bridges.
The tobacco industry is not, of course, in the business of helping people quit smoking, and nobody with a basic grasp of capitalism has ever claimed otherwise. The industry is in the business of selling whatever Americans are legally permitted to buy, and the FDA has spent ten years arranging that list to suit them.
The reversal that has Bloomberg so exercised will do precisely what the original ban did: hand the market a little further to the four large companies that can afford the compliance paperwork, while the gray market continues to dominate everything the four companies don’t make.
In turn, the teenagers will still find flavors, because they always do. But the adult smoker in Cleveland will still face a choice between an FDA-approved tobacco pod or a Chinese disposable of uncertain provenance.
The only thing that changes is which set of corporate shareholders gets to celebrate the announcement. The kids largely carry on as before, unhindered either way.
Britain takes vape regulation seriously and has done so for over a decade. America runs a regulatory system that bounces between bans and reversals, depending on who lobbies last. Bloomberg would like Congress to step in and restore the ban, but Congress would rather be left alone. The tobacco companies, meanwhile, would like another five years of this… please.
