Will New FDA Regs Leave Us with Crap?

Today’s issue of Motherboard features an article from Meghan Neal succinctly wraps up the fears of much of the vaping community: that the FDA’s new regulations may not completely kill the booming e-cigarette industry, but they will effectively hand it over to Big Tobacco.

“The difference between pre-loaded ‘cigalikes’ sold by Lorillard (the Blu e-cig) or Reynolds tobacco (the Vuse e-cig) and the customizable DIY mods beloved by the vape community is like the difference between instant coffee and responsibly sourced beans hand-ground and brewed with a high-end filter by a loving if pretentious barista.”

With their long-awaited new rules now published, it has become apparent that the new hurdles they want to place in front of new products may prove too much for the current market to bear. An example is their requirement for all e-cigarette products introduced after 2007 (which effectively includes everything on the market today). Some estimates place the cost of such approval at $3 to $4 million, obviously much too high for the modest mom and pop shops that basically are the whole industry if you leave out big tobacco and a small handful of other players.

The real problem here, as Neal explains, is not so much who will be selling the small number of companies who can afford to get their e-cigarette products approved, but that, in her words, “those products suck.”

Could FDA regulations leave us with only lowest-common-denominator products and kill the innovation that has brought us some really great vaping gear over the last few years? It seems very possible.

The E-Cig Industry Will Choke on New FDA Regulations—Except Big Tobacco | Motherboard.

Will New FDA Regs Leave Us with Crap?