Outgoing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned Friday that pod-based e-cigarettes could be banned altogether if rates of teen vaping continue to rise.
“If we can’t start reversing these trends this year and don’t see the rates start to come down we’ll have to take more dramatic actions,” Gottlieb said on Fox News. “We’ll have to look at the pod-based cigarettes as a category and potentially take them off the market.”
Gottlieb said the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey, released in August, would help determine whether such dramatic action was needed. Gottlieb has said that he’ll leave the agency next month.
[Related: FDA calls out Walgreens, Walmart, 7/11 and others for selling e-cigarettes to minors]
“If that shows another 30, 40, 50 percent increase of e-cigarette use among kids … I think we’ll have to look at actions that address this as a category,” Gottlieb said.
Tobacco industry leader Altria recently announced a $12.8 billion investment in e-cigarette manufacturer Juul, whose pod-based e-cigarettes dominate the market. Juul announced in November that they would stop selling most of its flavored pods, at least temporarily, amid FDA pressure.
Just two days ago, the FDA announced new regulations and tighter scrutiny for tobacco retailers selling e-cigarettes and flavored products. The new policies will make it much harder for convenience stores to sell vaping products.
Gottlieb has called teen vaping an epidemic and has focused much of his tenure at the FDA to cracking down on e-cigarettes.
