From: Bloomberg Business
By Anna Edney, Sophie Alexander, and Olivia Zaleski
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5. What has the FDA done?
In what it called the largest coordinated enforcement effort in its history, the agency over the summer issued more than 1,300 warning letters and fines to retailers that illegally sold e-cigarettes to minors. In September, FDA inspectors visited Juul Labs Inc.’s San Francisco headquarters and took away more than 1,000 pages of documents on sales and marketing. It gave e-cig makers until early November to put forward plans to “immediately and substantially reverse” the rise in youth vaping or face tougher rules. This was a change of tone for the FDA, which a year earlier had pushed back by four years until 2022 regulation of vaping devices beyond a current ban on sales to minors and a requirement for nicotine-addiction warnings. Gottlieb said then that he wanted to ensure an industry with the potential to reduce smoking rates wasn’t stymied by regulation.