Back in 2024 Virginia passed new laws around the sale of liquid nicotine products, commonly known as vapes. But it relied on federal action. And the delegate who wrote the law wants more of that action ahead of the law’s start date.
Delegate Rodney Willet was glad to see the Food and Drug Administration authorize Juul products earlier this month, but he said that brings the total number of authorized vape products to a few dozen while thousands of unauthorized products remain on Virginia shelves.
“They’ve done this for thousands of medicines; they’ve done this for cigarettes as an example," Willet told Radio IQ. "They need to catch up, do the same thing with vaping.”
The FDA didn’t say vapes are safer than not vaping, but its analysis of Juul and a handful of other vape products was “potentially less harmful” when used to quit smoking traditional cigarettes.
Willet’s law aimed to create a state registry of FDA approved vape products. The Attorney General’s office is then responsible for maintaining that list and then local commonwealth’s attorneys could charge local stores for selling products not on that list.
But Tony Abboud with the pro-vape Vapor Technology Association said Virginia’s law, and similar laws around the country, overstep federal authority to regulate their products. He also said the law would likely harm retailers instead of curb the practice.
“The registry law is designed to shut down the Virginia vape shops which have built their business to help adult consumers get off of cigarettes,” Abboud told Radio IQ.
Willet doesn’t want local shops to be dinged for illegal product sales. He’d rather see the FDA start at the top of the sales chain and go after products before they're distributed.
“Consumers should be able to buy confidently. There’s no way you can do that right now,” the Henrico-area Democrat said.
Virginia’s vape registry law goes into effect at the end of this year.
The effort to regulate vapes started under the first Trump administration in the hopes of curbing the use of the products among youth. The purchase age was raised to 21, and some flavored vape products were banned.
And while national data, including the Annual National Youth Tobacco Survey, suggests there has been a decrease in youth vaping from a 2019 high of 20 percent to 5 percent now, VCU Professor of forensic science Michelle Peace says her research suggests otherwise.
“We had some school systems tell us they think about 30% of their students are vaping, some school systems have said they believe as much as 60-70% of their students are vaping,” Peace told Radio IQ.
Peace’s research involves collecting confiscated vapes from Virginia school systems and testing them to see what’s inside. Last year, 15% of the over 600 confiscated vapes tested positive for THC products. A second round of tests underway now will examine twice the number of vapes from twice as many schools. Those results are expected in the Fall.
Still the future of state-level vape regulation is already working its way through the courts. A federal court in Iowa struck the Hawkeye state’s vape registry law, but the Richmond-based Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied a stay of North Carolina’s similar law earlier this week.
If an appeals court gets involved in the Iowa dispute, it could lead to a circuit split, teeing up the issue for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Abboud said the issue is states’ attempt to preempt federal law and they’re willing to litigate to prove their point.
“These shops have been around for over a decade, and we don’t think it's right that states are trying to supplant the decisions of the federal government and act when they’re not legally authorized to act,” he said. “Especially when the law would shut down Virginia businesses.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
