While denouncing e-cigarettes as dangerous, Ned Sharpless, the acting FDA commissioner, also expressed worries about the unintended effects of a wholesale vaping ban. “We are also quite concerned about people going back to (tobacco) cigarettes,” he told Congress on Wednesday.
Others think that kids will continue to find ways to vape, even after a ban drives more products to the black market. “I just don’t think kids are going to stop vaping,” said Michael Siegel, a physician and tobacco control researcher at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “I don’t think they’re going to say, ‘There’s no more flavored e-cigarettes, this is over.’”
The move could also drive kids to use more dangerous products, such as bootleg THC cartridges that regulators have little to no way of tracking, Siegel said.
As Gottlieb tweeted, “We can’t ban legal e-cigs and leave the THC and CBD unregulated.”
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