JUUL's home city proposes a ban on e-cigs

The city of San Francisco is coming for e-cigarettes. And, for Juul, it's personal.

Officials in San Francisco have introduced a four-pronged policy proposal to curb the use, manufacture, and sale of e-cigarettes. That includes a moratorium on selling e-cigarettes to customers within city limits, as well as prohibiting the business-side of manufacturing and distribution of vape products in San Francisco. The proposal hits leading vape-brand Juul hard, as its headquarters are in rented space in San Francisco's Pier 70.

"E-cigarettes have wiped out the hard-fought gains we have made in curbing youth tobacco use," City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement. "Today we are taking action to protect our kids."

The action is predicated on a national policy that says the FDA must study the public health of any new tobacco products before they go to market. The SF city attorneys claim that the FDA "has simply failed to do its job in unprecedented fashion" by not reviewing e-cig products before they hit shelves.

On March 13, the FDA released its proposed guidelines for e-cigarettes. It gives e-cigarette companies until 2021 to complete public health reviews of their products. San Francisco city attorneys, along with their counterparts in Chicago and New York City, say this is not enough. They've sent a jointly signed letter to the FDA urging it to "do its job and immediately conduct the required public health review of e-cigarettes that, by law, was supposed to happen before these products were on the market."

San Francisco has also asked the FDA to turn over its e-cigarette records so the city can determine whether it will take legal action against the FDA for what the city describes as abdicating its legal duties.

The FDA rule is also at the center of the proposed ban on selling and manufacturing e-cigarettes: The law would prohibit e-cigarette transactions of products that haven't undergone public health review. Which, it turns out, is all of them.

"This is not an outright ban on e-cigarettes," the statement reads. "It’s a prohibition against any e-cigarettes that haven’t been reviewed by the FDA to confirm that they are appropriate for the protection of public health."

The temporary ban would include selling e-cigarettes within San Francisco, as well as delivering e-cigarette products to San Francisco addresses.

The next part of the proposal includes a separate piece of legislation that serves as a punch in the gut to leading e-cigarette manufacturer, Juul, specifically. It includes prohibiting the "sale, manufacture and distribution of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, on City property in San Francisco."

While the proposed law wouldn't kick Juul out of its Bay Area home, it would prevent it from expanding in any way to more directly manufacture Juul products in SF.

The final prong of the proposed policy directly concerns Juul's office space. The city attorney has sent a letter to Juul's landlord for an explanation as to "why Juul holds a tobacco distributor license at that property when it has maintained that it 'does not engage in the sale of cigarettes or tobacco products' on the premises."

Juul takes a direct hit in the proposed policy because it is such a popular product among teenage users, and the city attorney's effort is directly aimed at curbing youth vaping. Juul maintains that it supports (and is currently undertaking) efforts to stop teens from Juuling, but thinks that the city attorney's action goes too far, especially since San Francisco still sells traditional cigarettes within city limits.

Juul declined to comment on whether it had any plans to stay or leave its SF office space. Here is the statement that Juul provided to Mashable in full:

We share the City of San Francisco’s concerns with youth usage of tobacco and vapor products, including our own. That is why we have taken aggressive action nationwide, including stopping the sale of flavored products to retailers and supporting strong, restrictive category wide regulation to keep e-cigarettes out of the hands of youth. But this proposed legislation’s primary impact will be to limit adult smokers’ access to products that can help them switch away from combustible cigarettes. We encourage the City of San Francisco to severely restrict youth access but do so in a way that preserves the opportunity to eliminate combustible cigarettes. This proposed legislation begs the question - why would the City be comfortable with combustible cigarettes being on shelves when we know they kill more than 480,000 Americans per year?

The FDA has taken action to limit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, which experts say contribute to the popularity of e-cigs among teens. Juul itself also has stringent age regulations, and is undertaking its own campaign to reduce teen use of its product. But it's not clear whether any policy on flavored cartridges or age restrictions will be enough to combat the Juuling craze and cool-kid aesthetic the products inspire.

With tobacco use up among teens who might never have picked up a cigarette in the first place, there's a strong case for the idea that more drastic action is necessary. Then again, Juuling and vaping more broadly has successfully converted smokers into vapers. The problem — which comes back to the city's original point about the need for FDA oversight — is that the health effects of vaping are still unknown.

“San Francisco has never been afraid to lead,” Herrera said in the statement. “We’re certainly not afraid to do so when the health and lives of our children are at stake."