20
TOBACCO BUSINESS
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014
TMA REPORT
By FARRELL DELMAN
…San Francisco, California-based
Ploom, inventor and manufacturer
of the premium vaporizer Pax,
which
heats tobacco without
producing
smoke
,
said
that
following the recent discovery of
counterfeit products that contain
plastic materials that are not
stable at operating temperature, it
conducted investigations to locate
manufacturers of the fake products
and initiated legal actions in China
to stop their production and sales,
noting that Ploom’s foremost goal is
to protect consumers from poorly-
performing and potentially unsafe
counterfeit devices.
…The
American
E-Liquid
Manufacturing Standards Association
(AEMSA) had its third “listening
session” with the Food and Drug
Administration on December 19, at
which Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos, a
cardiologist recognized as a leading
e-cig medical researcher, made a
primary presentation on his study
on plasma nicotine absorption
levels (PNLs). The study examined
nicotine delivered from both “ciga-
likes” and representative PNLs from
a “new generation” device used by
experienced e-cig consumers and
novice e-cig users (tobacco smokers),
and found that “PNLs from ciga-likes
were dramatically lower as compared
to tobacco cigarettes.” The new
generation device “showed evidence
of being more efficient at nicotine
delivery than the ciga-likes and came
closer to tobacco cigarette PNLs over
time, yet indicated tobacco cigarettes
still deliver substantively more nicotine
puff-for-puff,” while novice e-cig users’
PNLs indicated less nicotine absorption
compared to experienced e-cig users.
…AEMSA President Lou Ritter and
Counsel Azim Chowdhury of Keller
and Heckman LLP recently met with
representatives at the U.S. Office of
Management and Budget’s (OMB)
Office of Information and Regulatory
Affairs (OIRA) in December. At the
meeting, AEMSA said, among other
things, that the Family Smoking
Prevention and Tobacco Control
Act broadly defines a “tobacco
product” to include substances
that are derived from tobacco such
as nicotine, but “products that
only contain such tobacco-derived
substances should not be regulated
in the same manner” as cigarettes,
smokeless tobacco, RYO tobacco
and other products that contain
tobacco.
Tobacco-containing
products, especially those that are
combusted, are the most harmful,
while e-cigs and the e-liquid used
in them are “demonstrably less
On harm reductiOn…
Farrell Delman,
President, TMA
Breaking news From the tma
the following are excerpts from harm reduction,
tobacco regulation and other tobacco-related news.
