Free Republic

The chief executive of the company that makes Marlboro cigarettes was quoted by Britain’s Mail on Sunday as saying that the tobacco company foresaw an end to its sales of traditional cigarettes in Britain within 10 years. “I want to allow this company to leave smoking behind,” Jacek Olczak, the CEO of Philip Morris International, was quoted in the paper saying. “I think in the UK, ten years from now maximum, you can completely solve the problem of smoking.” […] For years, Philip Morris has said that its future will not include Marlboro cigarettes as it shifts to electronic devices....

E-cigarette company Juul Labs will pay $40 million and make changes to its business practices to settle the first state lawsuit that alleged it marketed to teens, North Carolina state attorneys announced on Monday."Under this consent order, Juul cannot sell mint. It cannot sell mango, it cannot sell crème brulee, or any other flavor," without authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration, Stein said in a news briefing after a court hearing on Monday. "Juul must abandon all marketing strategies and content that appeals to young people. Juul will be prohibited from influencer advertising, outdoor advertising near schools, sponsoring...

Utah Senator Mitt Romney argued that flavored e-cigarettes and vaping juices like “unicorn poop” should be banned because of their attractiveness to children. President Donald Trump hosted a lively discussion at the White House about the benefits and dangers of vaping flavors. The president spent over an hour listening to supporters for banning vaping flavors as well as vape industry advocates who have sharply criticized the president’s proposed ban. Senator Mitt Romney participated in the discussion in support of a ban on flavored vaping. He argued that most adults were not using vape flavors, earning a strong reaction from vape...

President Donald Trump reportedly has reconsidered a plan to ban flavored e-cigarettes, a reversal that was widely portrayed as a triumph of politics over public health. Yet that criticism more aptly describes the proposed ban, which would have sacrificed the interests -- and potentially the lives -- of current and former smokers in the name of curtailing underage vaping. There were political arguments on both sides of this debate. Advocates of the flavor ban argued it would appeal to suburban women concerned about the recent rise in e-cigarette use by teenagers, while opponents warned that it would alienate vapers who...

Sen. Mitt Romney with a New Mexico senator on Thursday presented a bill to keep electronic cigarettes and other vaping systems away from educational and child care facilities across the country, saying youth use has reached epidemic levels. "In my home state of Utah, the use of electronic cigarettes has nearly doubled in the last five years, with young Utahns most likely to be introduced to vaping while they are in school," Romney, R-Utah, said. "By banning the use of electronic cigarettes in schools, we are taking an important step to protect the health of young people in Utah and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge is siding with public health groups suing the Food and Drug Administration to begin reviewing thousands of e-cigarettes on the U.S. market. The ruling handed down Wednesday in district court states that the agency shirked its legal duty when it postponed reviewing all U.S. vaping products by several years. The American Academy of Pediatrics, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and other groups filed the federal lawsuit in Maryland last year. The groups say the lack of FDA oversight has led to an explosion in underage vaping by teenagers, threatening to hook a generation of Americans...

Sen. Mitt Romney is pushing legislation to raise the federal legal age to buy tobacco to 21, an effort backed by the tobacco industry and that health advocates hope will curtail younger Americans from smoking. Romney, a Utah Republican, said the bill was the first step in addressing an avoidable health crisis of young Americans taking up e-cigarettes as well as traditional tobacco products. The legislation would raise the age to buy any tobacco product to 21 as well as allow the Health and Human Services Department to conduct undercover compliance checks, retail inspections and enforce the law with fines.

This week, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine weighed in on the question of whether e-cigarettes are a public health menace or a public health boon. The answer is yes, according to a NASEM report published on Tuesday. The report, which was sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration, concludes that "e-cigarettes cannot be simply categorized as either beneficial or harmful to health." While that is true in principle, the report gives too much weight to scenarios in which these products could be harmful, even while confirming that they dramatically reduce exposure to toxins and carcinogens for smokers...

The Department of Health (UK/England) today released its tobacco control plan for England: Towards a smoke-free generation: tobacco control plan for England (PDF) The embrace of vaping and other low-risk alternatives to smoking runs through the text. This is probably the first significant government policy paper anywhere that recognises and pursues the opportunities of tobacco harm reduction, rather than defining these technologies as a threat to be suppressed. For that, the Department of Health and its allies deserve considerable credit. Some extracts on tobacco harm reduction.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday that cigarette prices in the city would go up $2.50 to $13 which, de Blasio bragged, would be "the highest price in the country." . . . Council Member Fernando Cabrera, who introduced the bill to create the licensing requirement for e-cigarette retailers, described the proposal as "a major step to limit the use of e-cigarettes, which are dangerous nicotine delivery systems that can lead to nicotine and potentially drug addiction."

ALBANY — Thanks to the new state budget, electronic cigarette users can puff away without the tax man taking a drag. Despite an alarming surge in e-cigarette use by high school students, state lawmakers — at the urging of the GOP-controlled Senate — rejected Gov. Cuomo’s plan to tax the liquid used in the devices and tighten restrictions on their use, advocates charged Monday. Cuomo’s proposals were mysteriously left out of the budget approved by the Senate and Assembly over the weekend. “The Senate Republicans picked big tobacco over public health,” said Bill Sherman, vice president for government relations at...

There had also been an eye-opening moment on the streets of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention, when [Johnson and I had] been walking behind a cigarette-wielding Ohioan. As the smoker’s exhaust wafted in our faces, I remarked offhand that—with the advent of e-cigarettes—I thought there was a good libertarian case for banning regular cigarettes. “I do too,” replied the health-obsessed triathlete, recounting his support for anti-smoking efforts in New Mexico.

Electronic cigarettes, which do not require a flame but heat tobacco leaves to create a vapor that is inhaled, are so popular in Japan these days that demand cannot keep up with supply. The e-cigarette boom was triggered by iQOS, a product released by Philip Morris Japan K.K. Rather than burning tobacco leaves, the iQOS heats cigarettes in a small cylindrical device — all designed exclusively for each other — so that nicotine and vapors are inhaled together. Sales of iQOS began in Tokyo in September last year, before expanding nationwide in April. Even though the kit is priced as...

On a cool spring day at the Capitol, Toni Atkins delivered a series of blows unlike anything the tobacco industry had ever felt in California. Then speaker of the Assembly, the San Diego Democrat had been a lame duck for the last six months since the house elected Anthony Rendon to replace her. It was a Thursday morning in March and her final session as speaker, a tenure that lasted just shy of a year and 10 months. In a series of quick votes, the Assembly passed six smoking bills, the most significant of which raised the age to buy...

Big Government: For decades, the federal government has been on a mission to create a “smoke-free society” — whether that involved stiff regulations, a massive lawsuit, or relentlessly higher taxes. So what’s the government’s response when private industry comes up with a product that actually could produce a smoke-free society? The government decides to regulate it to death.

The news of e-cigarette ban doesn't seem to have gone down too well with vaping advocates in Ontario. Hundreds of people marched on April 9 to Queen's Park to protest against the newly proposed ban on vaping in the Canadian province.

When statists get desperate, they resort to science by press release. Relying on the stupidity of the American people much like Gruber did with Obamacare. You can spend any news story. For example in the 1980s if the USSR lost to America in a Olympic sport final Pravda would report it as... Soviets finish second, America finishes second to last.

I quit. Or, more exactly, I’m quitting. Not a job or writing, I’m quitting smoking. And does it ever suck. I haven’t had a cigarette since the day I got married, Sept. 5th. It hasn’t been easy. It’s not “pass a stone” or “give birth” hard, but I have had moments of “I’d kill everyone in this room for a drag.” Less now, and less thanks to something politicians across the country are moving to ban – a vaporizer. Vaping, as it is called, is the ingestion of water vapor infused with nicotine and some sort of flavor – tobacco,...

Teens are increasingly turning to electronic cigarettes not to get their tobacco fix, but instead to inhale pot. A new study published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that teens have devised ways to turn e-cigarettes into devices for hashish oil, marijuana, wax and other cannabis products. Researchers surveyed 3,847 Connecticut high school students about their drug and e-cigarette use and found that students using e-cigarettes to vaporize cannabis was 27 times higher than the adult rate. According to the study, 5.5 percent of the students surveyed had used an e-cigarette to vaporize cannabis. In total, nearly 30 percent of...

Despite evidence that electronic cigarettes are both safer for users than tobacco and also help smokers kick the habit, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has launched a campaign against them. According to FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Ostroff, the FDA is looking to enact a “deeming rule” that would expand the agency’s regulation of tobacco to include e-cigarettes, which do not use tobacco. Critics contend that such an illogical decision underscores that the FDA is at the behest of lobbyists that benefit financially from tobacco and nicotine addiction.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued its proposal earlier this year for...