Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Over the past year, Air Bar has become one of the many sleek, disposable vapes that have become extremely popular after filling the enormous demand for flavored products following an FDA crackdown just before the pandemic. These disposables have avoided regulators with a simple trick: They use synthetic nicotine, which the FDA had no authority over until recently.
But Juul — which once had a valuation as large as Ford and controlled around 75 percent of the market — could soon be gone for good. As part of an extremely delayed process in which the FDA is reviewing tobacco-based e-cigarette products already on the shelves, the agency moved to outlaw the sale of Juul after it found last month that potentially harmful chemicals may be leaching from their plastic pods into the nicotine mix that users inhale.
Closing the synthetic-nicotine loophole that Puff Bar made infamous could bring serious change to the industry. “Retail establishments won’t be able to say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know this brand wasn’t okay,’” says Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “It ought to be pretty clear across the board.” But in practice, it’s going to be a lot harder for the FDA to figure out how to enforce its new rule.