Tobacco Giant Reynolds Introduces New Fruity E-Cigarettes to Confuse Kids and Evade Regulation
Statement of Yolonda C. Richardson, President and CEO, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
July 01, 2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. – According to the Wall Street Journal, tobacco giant Reynolds American is introducing a new line of fruit-flavored, disposable e-cigarettes that the company claims do not contain nicotine.
These products are a blatant effort to introduce a product onto the market to evade FDA regulation and promote the misperception among kids that e-cigarettes aren’t harmful. These products check off multiple boxes for targeting kids, including fun sounding flavors like watermelon frost, brightly colored packaging, and a design that looks just like Elf Bar, the most popular e-cigarette brand among kids in the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey.
It's no surprise that these products are being introduced by Reynolds, a company with a long history of marketing to kids dating back to Joe Camel. Reynolds is fully aware that flavors attract kids and flavored, disposable e-cigarettes are the most commonly used e-cigarettes among kids. This is an outrageous act by a tobacco company desperate to create future generations of addicts through starter products in the hopes that they will move on to highly addictive e-cigarettes.
Federal regulations require manufacturers of nicotine e-cigarettes to apply to the FDA and demonstrate that their products are appropriate for the protection of the public health in order to gain authorization to market them. Reynolds new product is an attempt to do an end-run around this requirement, as well as state and local laws that prohibit the sale of flavored nicotine e-cigarettes. FDA’s inadequate enforcement to remove illegal products from the market resulted in an e-cigarette epidemic among young people. The FDA and other relevant federal agencies must step up their enforcement efforts to clear the market of all unauthorized nicotine e-cigarette products and move quickly to review these “nicotine-free” products and take all appropriate action against them.