The American Lung Association of the Northeast applauds the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for releasing the long-awaited rules giving the agency regulatory authority over all tobacco products including cigars, electronic cigarettes, hookah and any future tobacco products.
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The FDA is aiming to keep the federally unregulated form of nicotine from minors.
Under the new rules, the FDA will require age verification by photo identification, ban sales from vending machines except in adults-only locations and stop the distribution of free product samples.
The new regulations will require health warnings, and all products that hit the market after February 2007 will have to submit to a federal review.
“As a nation, we’ve agreed for many years that nicotine does not belong in the hands of children”, said Sylvia Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services. “The actions being taken today will help the FDA prevent misleading claims by tobacco product manufacturers, evaluate the ingredients of tobacco products and how they are made, as well as communicate their potential risks”, the agency noted.
But opponents said the FDA’s product-review rules could harm the e-cigarette industry.
Public health advocates applauded the news. The first rider would prohibit FDA from implementing this final deeming regulation unless the regulation exempted certain cigars from basic FDA oversight.
So he did what millions of others are doing: he bought an e-cigarette. In stores, e-cigarettes are sold above ice cream freezers, next to candy and in flavors that include Cherry Crush and Gummy Bear.
More than 15 percent of high school students have reported using e-cigarettes, a number up more than 900 percent over the last five years, according to federal figures.
In 2009, the FDA began focusing on e-cigarettes as the product began appearing in the United States market. “About 1 in every 5 deaths each year can be traced back to tobacco products”. “The critical question that no one really knows right now is, will the FDA conclude that these new products are unsafe or not?”
Under the new law, cigars, pipe tobacco and hookah tobacco will also be subjected to the new rules.
Some e-cig people are taking the rules in stride.
22News talked with Ananda Lennox of the Northampton Healthy Youth Coalition who said she thinks the ban also needs to focus on how companies market their product.
“This is being regulated as a tobacco product but it contains no tobacco”, Agrafiotis said.
While teenagers seem to be tiring of traditional cigarettes, their smoking habits have given rise to other nicotine products, specifically e-cigs-battery-operated devices that turn nicotine and other chemicals into a vapor that is inhaled by the user.
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The use of electronic cigarettes, like the traditional ones, will be banned in public spaces across the state. Three million teens used e-cigarettes previous year, according to the government.
