Remarks by Amanda Wheeler at the Global Tobacco & Nicotine Forum

September, 2021

Thank you,

I’m pleased to be invited to speak to so many peers and colleagues, especially since it seems likely I will never get the chance again.  That’s because United States regulatory authorities appear determined to put the small company I built with my own hands, and the industry I represent, out of business entirely. FDA knew that they didn’t have the time or the resources to give our products fair consideration, but instead of asking for help, they let the 9/9 deadline pass and left the more than 500 companies subject to their decision in an unstable and probably untenable position.  

Let’s talk about the scope of that impact.  The FDA’s arbitrary ruling effectively criminalizes thousands of longstanding businesses in communities all across the country.  Those entrepreneurs now have to junk their inventory, fire their employees, stiff their investors, and defer their dreams.  We are the proverbial “little guy”, and like little guys throughout history our segment of the industry often gets short shrift in the negotiations between government regulators and deep-pocketed corporations that so often determines the rules for the rest of us.

We are the thousands of small business owners who manufacture, distribute and retail open systems products in vape shops all over the United States. We are proud of what we have built. We feel honor in what we do. We have made every attempt within our means to comply with FDA regulations, at great time and financial expense, in a system designed for us to fail from the very beginning.

The ruling makes the more than 10 million Americans who made the switch to vapor products—in our vape shops, with our liquids—into outlaws, too.  Oh, they can still purchase flavored vodka, filter-less cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, caffeinated soda pop, marijuana in countless varieties, opioids and sedatives – no matter how many people become addicted or die each year from those products.  But their freedom as Americans no longer includes the right to use a product that has harmed precisely no one and has undoubtedly saved the lives of countless former smokers. 

Let us mourn for a moment, too, not just the current consumers of open vapor products, but the untold number of smokers who may yet have discovered the potential of these products to move them toward a healthier, happier life.

The FDA didn’t have to do any of this. Nor did they have to create a rift between the publicly traded companies and the independently owned businesses in our industry, or between the big companies and the small ones. FDA could have approached this by allowing companies that have always been registered with them, and inspected by them, to continue serving their customers, while approaching the broader issue from a basis in sound science and true public health, rather than a politicized process centered around the focus-group tested buzzwords.

But the reality is that the FDA has failed. Failed.

To the FDA, we say you have created a tobacco-led monopoly over the vaping industry while crushing our small businesses.

To those who may cheer the increase in their market share brought on by this act of regulatory arson, we say: shame on you.

To our customers, we say that we did everything within our power to avoid this outcome, and that we will not stop trying, through every legal means and every means of advocacy we have at our disposal. We are not surrendering our business or abandoning vapers to cigarettes. We will fight for them.

And there is one other group I want to address with my time here. It’s the activists and the press who—whether because they are misguided or malicious—spread the falsehoods and distortions that directly led to this tragic outcome.

It is long past time for some candid honesty about what has motivated this outrageous decision by US federal law enforcement. 

For years now, a horde of activist groups, hellbent on controlling the personal choices of their fellow citizens, has been targeting our industry for destruction.  They are funded by the most wealthy foundations in America at the direction of unaccountable billionaires and they have been strong-arming the US Congress and White House to engineer a result they have failed to achieve through public persuasion. 

To do it, they relied not just on campaign contributions and Washington lobbyists.  They also used bunk research from discredited operatives like Dr. Stanton Glantz, whose most widely-publicized study on vaping had to be retracted from the medical literature for its bogus methodology.  They have falsely claimed – despite all logic and economic common sense – that our products are marketed to minors, even as their own advertising material uses adolescent themes and images to inform young people about nicotine. 

Yet even when their far-fetched and hypothetical theories of harm couldn’t pass the smell test, they retreated to a fallacy called the “precautionary principle.”  Until we could prove that vaping was harmless, as that backward thinking goes, we would be prohibited from the market.  

In this malign effort, those activists had enthusiastic help from nearly the whole of the national news media.  By focusing on the messaging of Bloomberg dark money NGOs and beneficiaries of MSA funds, our media and political class have criminally neglected the harm reduction aspects of vaping under the guise of moral virtue. The years added to their lives by our products are never mentioned.

Just last month, FDA records gathered by Freedom of Information laws revealed that America’s most preeminent news organization, the New York Times, would send its articles in their entirety and before publication, to FDA officials for review and feedback.  Neither that reporter, Sabrina Tavernise, nor her editors have summoned the integrity to offer any explanation. 

Even two days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a gushing story about a new advertising campaign from the perversely named Truth Initiative which claims that vaping nicotine QUOTE “can worsen symptoms of anxiety and depression.”

But that is entirely untrue and is contradicted by studies that even Truth Initiative has on its own website. Incredibly, the Journal even quoted a Truth Initiative executive admitting that “it is unknown whether a causal link exists” between nicotine and those symptoms. 

Remember, these are journalists that routinely praise and award themselves for being guardians of the public health and democracy.  Yet they have ignored the seminal fact that millions of Americans have successfully quit smoking by using a harmless and affordable device that far exceeds the efficacy of any other nicotine replacement therapy.  More Americans are vaping than use any single pharmaceutical drug on the market today, yet the news of FDA’s arbitrary ban passed with minimal coverage and zero complaint from those news outlets. 

In these last few weeks I have heard from an endless thread of crestfallen business owners along with vaping consumers desperate about how they will continue to access the products they believe are essential.  But even through their dismay, I am also hearing a constant refrain – we are not going to stand for it.   

If federal health authorities or deep-pocket foundations imagine they can steamroll the American public by administrative dictates that are devised behind closed doors, they will soon discover why the US Constitution begins with the words We The People.

We intend to commence a public campaign that counts more than 10 million Americans in every state and congressional district, along with their friends and families.   

We will be at the FDA’s doorstep demanding answers or forcing them through Freedom of Information laws and the courts.  We are going to shine a megawatt spotlight on the journalists and news outlets that have been colluding with activists to deceive the American public.  We are not going to sit still while the FDA endangers our health, crushes our livelihoods, and treats the American people like gullible idiots.  You don’t tamper with people’s lives like that and we aren’t going to stand for it. 

As we say in Colorado, this is more than just a fight.  It’s going to be a reckoning.