Before he quietly and timely left office on January 20, one of former President Donald Trump’s last acts in office was to threaten the business models of the marijuana and nicotine vaporization industries.
and it is very likely that neither trump nor the majority of congress knew what they were doing.
what happened?
washington, dc: former us. President Donald Trump listens during a listening session on youth… [+] vaping e-cigarettes November 22, 2019 in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC. One of Trump’s last acts was to sign a law that severely restricts the ability of vaporizer companies to ship direct to consumers.
on December 1 January 27, 2020, a little over a week before the deadly Jan. 6 united states capitol riots, trump signed into law the consolidated appropriations act of 2021.
Along with cash for Covid-19 relief and to prevent a government shutdown during the pandemic, the 5,000-page, $2.3 trillion spending bill included an update to the law (or pact) to “prevent all cigarette traffic”.
a decade-old law that makes shipping tobacco products across the us uu. couriers or private carriers like fedex or dhl are more expensive and difficult, the covenant act was written before the vape craze, before fresh mint and mango flavored juul became popular in high schools, and before the moral panics that accompanied it.
several legislators, including sen. dianne feinstein (d-california) and sen. john cornyn (r-tx), had been trying to enforce covenant law restrictions on vaporizers for years.
The spending bill egregiously included many provisions unrelated to government spending or Covid-19 relief. As the National Law Review noted, that included most of the compact law amendments that Feinstein and Cornyn had been pushing. (One of his co-sponsors: Former California Sen. Kamala Harris, now Vice President.)
washington, dc – march 18: usa. uu. vice president kamala harris, leading a recent virtual labor meeting … [+]. As a senator from California, Harris sponsored legislation restricting the shipping of vaporizer products through the mail, including private carriers.
Worse, after the law was passed, it was interpreted to include “all vaping products.” Starting this spring, the previous rules and bans on mailing cigarettes now also apply to nicotine, hemp, and cannabis vaporizers, as well as their components: batteries, tanks, and whatever else you can think of.
It is important to note that it is still legal to send tobacco products and vaporizers through the mail. is very cumbersome: businesses must verify the age of customers, register with law enforcement agencies, and submit to state authorities a detailed list of all transactions, and the penalties that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms fire (atf) can impose on offenders are serious.
so most operators have chosen not to bother.
As of this month, the United States Postal Service, FedEx, UPS and other carriers refuse to ship “vaping devices, products and accessories”.
the last day to order juul pods directly from that company is April 21 (a company spokesperson declined to comment for this story).
juul, a massive corporation with a significant footprint in traditional retailers, will probably be fine.
but many small businesses doing direct-to-consumer sales, including, within the broad store of the cannabis industry, providers of legal hemp vaporizers as well as generic vaporizer components, are now scrambling to find a reliable way and affordable. to reach consumers.
Those that can’t are already cutting staff, reducing operations, raising prices or preparing to close, industry representatives said.
“That’s not what Congress set out to accomplish,” said Shawn Hauser, a partner in Denver at the law firm Vicente Sederberg LLP and president of the law firm’s cannabis practice. “The potential impact is really serious.”
a pax vaporizer was used for cartridges with marijuana concentrates. legal to possess in all 50 states, … [+] shipping companies like ups and fedex now refuse to handle these products thanks to a new federal law signed by former president donald trump.
The irony is that, if applied to cannabis and hemp vaporizer products, the compact law directly contradicts other areas of the law, including the 2018 farm bill, which broadly legalized both hemp-derived products and your delivery by mail.
apparently, the us postal service. uu. will continue to mail certain hemp products, such as smokable hemp flowers. But suppliers of hemp-based vaporizer products, including delta-8 THC cannabis products, are all caught up in the new covenant law’s bans.
again, that doesn’t mean any of this is forbidden. it is more complicated and more expensive. At the very least, that means a disruption to existing business models.
At least a quarter of retail vaporizer sales are now done online, with products shipped directly to consumers, experts said.
“The good news is that American ingenuity should never be underestimated,” said Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, a trade group that has been lobbying against rule changes. “For some smaller logistics companies, this represents a profitable business opportunity.”
“The bad news is that if you’re a small manufacturer or retailer, doing business with hundreds of packages a day, you’re going to have to work really hard to figure out how to stay in business, if you want to do things legally.” , he added.
Some companies with experience shipping “sensitive” or restricted goods, including firearms and ammunition, have already quietly moved into the vaporizer industry, Conley said. she declined to name names.
Lobbyists and advocates for the vaporizer companies affected by the expansion of the compact law are trying to get the attention of lawmakers as well as the US Postal Service. The US, which was accepting public comment on the rule changes until Monday.
There is hope that the law will be amended or further clarified to allow at least some use of US mail to ship certain products.
But Conley noted a disturbing and depressing parallel: Some of the law’s backers, including Cornyn and Feinstein, were also longtime drug war advocates.
“And now comes the war on drugs for nicotine,” he said. “While we are unchaining the worst crimes of the war on drugs, we seek to start a new one with nicotine.”