FDA releases Vaping Industry Guidance

17 June 2019

"... we [USA] could be facing the end of the legal independent vaping industry in the very near future. That would mean tens of thousands of employees losing their jobs, and perhaps millions of vapers either turning to the black market for e-liquid and supplies, or migrating back to cigarettes..."

Full article here

Very sad day for the industry.

It's a problem with no readily apparent solution. Both political parties in the US favour big business to an extraordinary degree. Both Dems and GOP are funded by donations from huge corporations. So the belief that Trump would side with the little guy in opposing the tobacco and pharmaceutical giants was just a tad naive.

Trump ran on a platform of making America great again. What made America great was the exporting of its products to the world. Tobacco and pharma products were prominent among those. People around the world smoke American cigarettes and take American medicines. Vaping, by contrast, makes China great. Every country imports the bulk of its vaping hardware from China. Considering Trump's general attitude towards trade with China, it was a no-brainer that his FDA was merely going to continue on the path established by Obama's FDA.

So the US govt, whether it's Dem or Rep, want vaping to be the domain of half a dozen enormous corporations, not ten thousand little guys. Because then they can control the market and solicit funding from the huge players. Unless there is an enormous shake-up of the US political landscape, I don't see small business vaping getting a break any time soon.

Perhaps the only light on the horizon is the growing progressive movement on the left, headed by people like Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They claim to be pro-labour and anti-corruption/anti-corporatism so they may view small businesses favourably. However, they are also staunchly socialist which means even more tax, even bigger government and even more regulations. Plus, even if they got into power, there's the strong possibility that they would just adopt whatever the previous administrations did and continue with it.

The US establishment has a way of bringing the new leaders around to their way of thinking. Obama was anti-war, yet his administration not only continued the Bush-era wars but launched new ones. Trump said he'd drain the swamp. Look how well that turned out. The US establishment likes huge corporations. They'll bring any anti-corporatist President around to that way of thinking.