When my phone lit up with the notification I’d been expecting for weeks — that Juul would cave to pressure from the Trump administration and discontinue selling mint vaping pods — I promptly headed to the closest store selling pods I could find to stock up.
In my home city of Washington, D.C., I usually buy Juul pods at 7-Eleven. Here in New York City, there’s a vape shop on every block, so I headed to the first one I saw.
“Business must be booming,” I joked as I asked for mint pods.
“Yes, now it’s good,” the cashier said. “In a month from now, these will all be gone.”
He gestured towards the glass-lined wall, loaded with hundreds of tobacco-free smoking products, all flavored, and, I realized, all immediately under siege by both New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and President Trump.
I naively asked what he’d sell instead. He didn’t know. He offered me a pack of cucumber pods and another creme brulee. He had to get rid of them anyway, he explained before the city shut him down for selling newly illicit products.
The most obvious line of attack against the paternalistic policies of nanny-state Democrats and Republicans seeking to shut down flavored vape products is the immediate increase in the smoking rate.
Vaping has proven the single most effective technique to help smokers cease using cigarettes, a habit that kills half of its lifelong users. But another cost of the crackdown is the destruction of an entire industry of small business owners who’ve created tens of thousands of jobs in helping people switch from smoking carcinogenic cigarettes to vaping FDA-approved and tobacco-free e-cigarettes.
Curious, I headed to a few more shops, all staffed with workers of color who all had the same answer as to what they’d do after the crackdown: They had no idea.
The 7-Eleven worker likely won’t face firing because of the revenue lost from regulated vape pods. But every vape shop employee in the nation could lose livelihoods.
As of 2014, the Smoke-Free Alternative Trade Association estimated that there were at least 35,000 vape shops in the nation, with at least twice as many jobs created as a result. Seeing as vaping has replaced cigarette smoking for millions of people over the past decade, the number of workers employed by vape shops are likely significantly greater today.
Yet contrary to his campaign promise that he’d remember the forgotten man, Trump has let his FDA run rampant with a moral panic crusade harming vape shop owners, many of whom are non-college graduates and immigrants. Already, as a result of his pressure campaign scaring the vaping industry to a standstill, 200 vape shops have closed in this year alone, with some surviving stores reporting a loss of the majority of their revenue.
In New York, Cuomo is to blame for the impending crisis of vape shop workers. But around the country, vape shops have been just as harmed by the FDA’s wildly irresponsible suggestions that legal vape pods were responsible for lung injuries — when, in fact, illegal THC-laced pods were — as they’ve been by Trump scaring large vape companies like Juul into shelving their own products.
The science is clear: Vaping legal, FDA-regulated products is wildly, if not entirely, safer than smoking cigarettes, and just 4% of adults who’ve never smoked cigarettes have begun to vape. But Trump has ignored the science in his misguided crusade, and thus he’s ignored the small business owners he promised to save from Big Government.
