RegWatch by RegulatorWatch.com
Aug 12, 2026 · 1 hr · 10 segments
For years, the U.S. vaping industry played defense against fear-driven headlines, political pressure campaigns, flavor bans, and state registry bills designed to eliminate nearly every nicotine vaping…
Geoff HabichtGuest
Brent StaffordHost
What would you say is had the biggest or most detrimental impact on the vaping industry in the U.S.?
I think the lack of clarity on the regulatory process has been the biggest challenge.
And the reason why that's the biggest challenge is it creates misinformation, confusion.
You know, the good actors who try and do the right thing oftentimes get outpaced by the bad actors who just don't care.
You know, the regulatory framework at the federal level as it exists today is subjective.
Meaning that to submitting the testing requirements and the information to prove that your product is appropriate for the protection of public health is not a set of criteria, right? In other countries, Canada, the UK, objective metrics have been put in place which allows people to get through the system.
The challenge with that here in the US is because it's subjective, meaning it's completely up to the people at the FDA to make a decision.
Smaller and medium-sized businesses don't have the ability to go to capital markets and raise money in order to spend tens of millions of dollars on behavioral studies and pharmacology studies, clinical trials.
if we do X, Y, and Z, the product can get authorized, then it leaves everybody in limbo, scrambling to try and figure out what's the best way to do it.
We, as Miwon Brands, we submitted pre-market tobacco authorization applications for a slew of products.
Those products were accepted for review by the FDA and they continue to sit there.
So an industry that has this level of innovation where we're constantly trying to make things better less harmful, more effective to get people to quit smoking.
When you have a regulatory body that moves that slowly, by the time that you get all of the things to submit products, the market has passed you by.
So that's really, and that federal level, we can go into this in more detail, but it creates a challenge at the state level because when the federal government hasn't put rules and regulations in place that are clear, objective, and concise, the states take it upon themselves to say, hey, within our state, let's figure out what we want to do.
And we end up with a patchwork regulatory framework across all 50 states that makes it very difficult for manufacturers to be compliant, for distributors to ensure that they're staying within the bounds of the law, for retailers that are multi-state operators to be able to train their employees to know what the rules are in each different place, and for the consumer to know what they can and can't have access to.
What has been the impact, do you think, on consumers in the US with all of this compliance issues, enforcement actions, vape shops shutting down?
What would you say is had the biggest or most detrimental impact on the vaping industry in the U.S.?
I think the lack of clarity on the regulatory process has been the biggest challenge.
And the reason why that's the biggest challenge is it creates misinformation, confusion.
You know, the good actors who try and do the right thing oftentimes get outpaced by the bad actors who just don't care.
You know, the regulatory framework at the federal level as it exists today is subjective.
Meaning that to submitting the testing requirements and the information to prove that your product is appropriate for the protection of public health is not a set of criteria, right? In other countries, Canada, the UK, objective metrics have been put in place which allows people to get through the system.
The challenge with that here in the US is because it's subjective, meaning it's completely up to the people at the FDA to make a decision.
Smaller and medium-sized businesses don't have the ability to go to capital markets and raise money in order to spend tens of millions of dollars on behavioral studies and pharmacology studies, clinical trials.
if we do X, Y, and Z, the product can get authorized, then it leaves everybody in limbo, scrambling to try and figure out what's the best way to do it.
We, as Miwon Brands, we submitted pre-market tobacco authorization applications for a slew of products.
Those products were accepted for review by the FDA and they continue to sit there.
So an industry that has this level of innovation where we're constantly trying to make things better less harmful, more effective to get people to quit smoking.
When you have a regulatory body that moves that slowly, by the time that you get all of the things to submit products, the market has passed you by.
So that's really, and that federal level, we can go into this in more detail, but it creates a challenge at the state level because when the federal government hasn't put rules and regulations in place that are clear, objective, and concise, the states take it upon themselves to say, hey, within our state, let's figure out what we want to do.
And we end up with a patchwork regulatory framework across all 50 states that makes it very difficult for manufacturers to be compliant, for distributors to ensure that they're staying within the bounds of the law, for retailers that are multi-state operators to be able to train their employees to know what the rules are in each different place, and for the consumer to know what they can and can't have access to.
What has been the impact, do you think, on consumers in the US with all of this compliance issues, enforcement actions, vape shops shutting down?
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