A ban on most flavours would be a direct hit on Juul's business, as 85 percent of domestic sales will be affected. It could also have repercussions for the $2.6 billion industry at large
A ban on flavored e-cigarettes would not only severely dent sales of Juul Labs’ popular vaping products, but also have a chilling effect on the little-regulated $2.6 billion industry of roughly 20,000 vape and smoke shops that sprung up across the country in the past few years.
But a day after Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, said the Food and Drug Administration would draft a plan within weeks that would remove flavored e-cigarettes and nicotine pods from the market, there were already signs that some companies were considering legal challenges or lobbying efforts to keep two flavors safe — mint and menthol. One Juul official said the company was deliberating whether to challenge the proposed restrictions specifically on those two flavors.
When Juul stopped selling fruit flavors like mango in retail stores last year, Kevin Burns, the company’s chief executive, said he wanted to keep mint and menthol varieties on the market, because they mirrored the tastes of traditional cigarettes.
As the dominant e-cigarette company in the United States, Juul may be reluctant to take the lead on a court fight while it is boxed in by another regulatory setback: On Monday, the FDA accused Juul of illegally marketing its products as safer than traditional cigarettes. A ban on most flavors would be a direct hit on Juul’s business; flavored products account for about 85% of domestic sales, company officials have said.
Even as it faces increased scrutiny and regulatory hurdles in the United States, Juul is pushing into new markets abroad — this week in China and Portugal — where it often faces fewer restrictions regarding the age of the buyer or its ability to offer an array of flavors.
In the United States, top health officials in the Trump administration and some lawmakers hoped the flavor ban would significantly reduce the startling rise in teenage vaping. And the ban is being drafted as health officials rush to deduce what exactly is causing an outbreak of vaping-related respiratory illnesses, which now nears about 380 cases in about three dozen states and has possible links to six deaths. Many of the illnesses have been linked to vaping mixtures with THC, the high-inducing chemical in marijuana, although health officials also say that some patients report using e-cigarettes as well.
©2019 New York Times News Service