On Friday, a federal appeals court gave Juul Labs a temporary reprieve that will allow it to keep its e-cigarettes on the market, pending further court review of a decision made just a day earlier by the Food and Drug Administration to ban sales of the company’s products. The decision to ban sales of the company’s products had been made in response to a petition filed by the company.
Juul was successful in getting a temporary stay of execution from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which he had requested. The delay “should not be regarded in any manner as a judgement on the merits,” the order from the appeals court noted in its short order.
The stay pertains to an order issued by the F.D.A. on Thursday, in which the agency stated that Juul had to cease selling its products because the company had provided conflicting and insufficient data, which prevented the F.D.A. from assessing the potential health risks of its products. The stay involves this matter.
The decision on whether or not Juul should be permitted to continue selling its products during the time that the firm is appealing the judgement made by the FDA will be made by the appeals court. Juul was given until Monday at noon to submit a further motion, and the Food and Drug Administration was given until July 7 to file a move in response.
In its urgent request for a stay, Juul stated that the decision to restrict sales of its product by the Food and Drug Administration was driven by political forces that tried to blame the firm for the juvenile vaping epidemic. According to the complaint, the F.D.A. decided to rule against Juul “following enormous political pressure from Congress,” despite the fact that some of Juul’s rivals now have a bigger market share and considerably higher rates of underage usage.
Despite this, the F.D.A. did not list the use of Juul by minors as a factor in its decision to remove the product from the market. Instead, the government said that Juul had not presented any information to support its claim that its product prevents contaminants from seeping from the device into the nicotine vapour that users inhale.
Will customers of Juul still be able to purchase pods and electronic cigarettes from the company?
As long as the stay remains in effect, customers will be allowed to purchase Juul cartridges as well as its pods in flavours like as tobacco and menthol. The F.D.A. had previously issued a warning that merchants that sold Juul devices might be subject to enforcement action at some time in the future, but this action will not be taken while a stay is in effect.
In its complaint with the court, Juul said that the judgement made by the government agency had “already had its intended impact,” which meant that some stores had already ceased selling Juul products.
The F.D.A. does not intend to pursue a ban on all vape goods in their entirety. The government has been considering applications for millions of different devices as part of its newly acquired regulatory jurisdiction over so-called electronic nicotine delivery systems, often known as ENDS. It has already given its stamp of approval to 23 of them, including R. J. Reynolds’s Vuse Alto, which is now the most popular product on the market, as well as numerous other brands created by NJoy and Logic. (Requests for a million different items have been turned down.)
The FDA is required to assess, as a component of its examination, whether a product is a workable alternative to combustible tobacco, whether it can assist those who smoke cigarettes in kicking the habit, and if the benefits to public health exceed the risks.
According to research conducted by Nielsen, the most successful vaping brand in the United States over the course of the last 12 weeks was Vuse Alto. This brand generated a total of $414 million in sales and held 33.4% of the entire market for electronic cigarettes. Juul came in at a very tight second place with a market share of 33 percent. The second best-selling brand, NJoy Ace, accounted for only 2.4 percent of the market, which means that none of the other brands even came close to these two firms in terms of sales.
According to Euromonitor, a data analysis company, the income generated by the cigarette business in the United States was around $99 billion in 2017, whereas the revenue generated by vaping devices like Juul was just $7.8 billion. However, sales of tobacco products are falling: Euromonitor predicts that sales of cigarettes will drop by roughly 13 percent through 2026, while sales of vaping goods are predicted to climb by around 22 percent over the same time period. According to the regulatory filings, the tobacco behemoth Altria, which had acquired a stake of 35 percent in Juul in 2018, revealed that its sales had marginally decreased in the previous year.
The number of people who smoke conventional cigarettes in the United States is believed to be 30 million, a figure that has been falling over the last few decades.