Numlock Sunday: Katherine Ellen Foley on the FDA vape crackdown

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Katherine Ellen Foley, who wrote “FDA nears day of reckoning on e-cigarettes” for POLITICO. Here's what I wrote about it:

The Food and Drug Administration is fast approaching the September 9 deadline by which they’ll decide the fate of each and every electronic cigarette product in the United States after reviewing millions of applications. They’ve already blocked 55,000 flavored vapes, and onlookers in the vape business think that the big winners will be the established, wealthy tobacco companies who have the dough to do the requisite research and deal with the regulatory hoops ahead. Juul, for instance, owned by Altria has about 40 percent of the market. There are lots of up-front costs: one vastly smaller company that produces 14 flavors said it spent about $7,000 per flavor to apply and provide the scientific answers the FDA is looking for.

And later in the week, that reckoning came: the FDA denied 950,000 a…