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WARNING:This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.
Launch Time: 2016-10-30 Views: 1982 Rely: 0 Started by:
Unless Congress takes immediate action, at least 50 small businesses in New Mexico and over 10,000 businesses nationally will permanently close in August 2018 – perhaps sooner. Since Aug. 8, at least five vapor product retailers in the Albuquerque area closed permanently due to new Food and Drug Administration regulations.These closures destroyed peoples’ American Dream, life savings and dozens of jobs paying well above minimum wage. Without congressional intervention, this is just the beginning.
What New Mexico’s Ecigs Wholesaler Will Face? I urge Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham to fight for New Mexican business owners, workers and their families, and encourage Democratic leadership to ensure this year’s omnibus funding bill contains an important bipartisan amendment called the Cole-Bishop Amendment. It is the only hope to save the remaining businesses and jobs in her district.
The FDA’s new vapor regulations represent egregious regulatory overkill that will squash hard-working small-business people. My Albuquerque-based company is a leading U.S. manufacturer of liquid used in vapor products. However, the costs of complying with the FDA’s regulations are so astronomical that 99 percent of vapor companies, including mine, have no hope of survival after 2018. Time is running out.
Only the largest tobacco and pharmaceutical companies can afford the FDA’s monstrous approval process. My company alone faces a cost burden of $150 million to $500 million to keep our products on the market. Even if we could afford it, the process allows the FDA unchecked and arbitrary discretion to deny any application.
What New Mexico’s Ecigs Wholesaler Will Face? Attempting compliance with the FDA’s gauntlet is a quixotic endeavor for any small- or mid-sized business. And yet deadly tobacco cigarettes face no such regulations and will remain freely on the market. There is a very fair and reasonable solution to this: modernize what the FDA calls the “predicate date” to Aug. 8 of this year by passing Cole-Bishop.
By forcing the FDA to regulate products on the market rather than push prohibition, it will save New Mexican small businesses and the families they support. While the industry welcomes rigorous product standards, the FDA’s current rules offer no realistic path to compliance for any vapor business. The predicate date not being amended this year will reverberate destruction well beyond the core vapor industry. Tens of thousands of New Mexicans rely on vapor products as a harm-reduction alternative to smoking.
If August 2018 passes and Congress fails to fix this, voters will be angry and a negative net effect on public health will unfold as vapers revert to smoking or resort to the black market. The economic impact on New Mexico alone will exceed millions of dollars in lost sales, income and corporate tax revenue our industry generates. Storefronts and warehouses will be shuttered and mass job losses will further burden the state’s economy when hard-working families turn to unemployment benefits for survival.
For six years, my company has helped thousands of smokers switch to these technological alternatives to smoking. It is my life’s purpose to continue. Yet, without congressional action, my mission will end. Billions of dollars in annual revenues will evaporate nationally, leaving behind a catastrophic economic implosion only beneficial to Big Tobacco. My industry is often and unfortunately confused with Big Tobacco, but in truth, the majority of vapor companies are run by people like me – earnest, hard-working ex-smokers who rose from the ashes to fight 450,000 annual deaths in the U.S. alone attributed to tobacco-related disease and illness.
What New Mexico’s Ecigs Wholesaler Will Face? The FDA’s current regulations will swiftly remove us and our innovative harm-reduction products from that equation as compliance is impossible. We need Lujan Grisham and her congressional colleagues to be the people’s voice and understand we share the same goals – to help small businesses across the country stay open and continue to fight for a smoke-free society.
