WASHINGTON - Everything seemed ready to go: President Donald Trump's ban on most e-cigarette flavours had been cleared by federal regulators. Officials were poised to announce that they would order candy, fruit and mint flavors off the market within 30 days - a step the president had promised almost two months earlier to quell a youth vaping epidemic that had ensnared 5 million teenagers.
Officials said the blowback to Trump's vow to ban most flavoured e-cigarettes had rattled him. In an aggressive social media campaign - #IVapeIVote - advocates claimed the ban would shut down thousands of shops, eliminating jobs and sending vapers back to cigarettes. The president saw protesters at events and read critical articles.
Some bet that the anti-vaping effort is dead, though, especially because the administration could argue that the youth vaping problem has been greatly eased by Juul Labs' recent decision to stop selling its popular mint-flavoured nicotine pods. The administration's intense focus on e-cigarettes began more than a year ago, when then-Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb sounded the alarm about"an epidemic" of youth vaping that was hooking a new generation on nicotine, a problem he blamed largely on Juul, the industry leader. Late last year, the company suspended sales of many of its flavoured products in brick-and-mortar stores and later stopped the sales online.
Two days later, though, in a sign of his discomfort, Trump tweeted that he liked"the Vaping alternative to Cigarettes," but wanted to keep children from using them. Aides said that was the first signal they saw that he could reverse course. On Oct 31, aides met with Trump again. By then, they had decided to exempt menthol from the ban because new federal data showed that the flavour wasn't popular among young people and that they wanted to keep menthol vapes on the market as long as menthol e-cigarettes are legal. A final briefing for Trump was planned for the following Monday, during Trump's trip to Kentucky to campaign for Republican Governor Matt Bevin.
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