In the early days of changes in laws to products like alcohol, some people below the new legal threshold were still able to get it. It was impossible to arrest everyone selling illegally, and there was a certain freedom argument many made, i.e. why can I shoot a Nazi in Europe but not buy a beer in the US?

That's where e-cigarettes are now. A decade ago, while valuable for smoking cessation and harm reduction in smokers, it was also the Wild Wild West in retail. All they had to do was buy a 50-gallon vat of liquid nicotine and sketchy merchants could set up shop near a school. And too many did. It needed some guidance. Did the Obama administration go too far too soon? Yes, they put a lot of fine companies out of business to get a few miscreants. They made it so only Big Tobacco could afford the regulatory process to get approval, so only 23 products have survived the expensive gauntlet.

All nicotine should not be under a blanket regulation - cigarettes kill, but if you say smoking a pipe ever killed anyone you probably got an epidemiologist to torture statistics until they confessed - yet we all know bad regulations are a government specialty. They're still the law until someone figures out that Red Bull is harming far more child brains than nicotine.



Yet the law is the law and that is why FDA is going after Puff and Hyde disposable e-cigarette merchants. Vaping in youth was very much only a fad, never a gateway to smoking as the Obama administration tried to claim, but if companies are going to flout the law everyone else obeys in order to line their pockets, they need to get fines or get to jail. These products account for 20 percent of youth usage. On surveys. Are surveys basically useless? Sure, especially among young people, but government loves them when it matches their political litmus test. And one thing is certain; the Biden administration has become the most social authoritarian executive branch since FDR.