The Trump administration on Thursday announced a ban on some e-cigarette flavors to curb rising teenage use of vaping products, allowing menthol and tobacco flavors to remain on the market.
The flavor ban applies to e-cigarettes such as the ones made by Juul Labs Inc, which use disposable cartridges filled with liquid nicotine and are often sold in convenience stores.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said companies that do not stop the manufacture, distribution and sale of flavored cartridge-based e-cigarettes, other than tobacco or menthol, within 30 days risk enforcement actions from the Food and Drug Administration.
“The United States has never seen an epidemic of substance use arise as quickly as our current epidemic of youth use of e-cigarettes,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said.
“HHS is taking a comprehensive, aggressive approach to enforcing the law passed by Congress, under which no e-cigarettes are currently on the market legally,” Azar added.
(Reporting by Uday Sampath, Saumya Joseph and Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru and Chris Kirkham in Los Angeles; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
