CASAA 2nd Call to Action for consumers regarding FDA vaping / ecig regulations

UPDATE 5/27/14: Part IIB of this Call to Action has been updated to ask that you use a DIFFERENT SUBJECT LINE in your email to OMB/OIRA. If you have already submitted your email to OMB/OIRA, we are suggesting that in an over abundance of caution, you resend the email with the new subject line (see below Part IIB).

On Thursday, May 8th, CASAA released the Overview of its Action Plan Regarding Proposed FDA Regulations. On May 11, 2014, CASAA released the first of several Calls to Action anticipated in CASAA's Action Plan. This is the second Call to Action in CASAA's Action Plan.

There is an interim deadline for comments on the deeming regulation. Specifically, any comments on the Paperwork Reduction Act aspects of the proposed regulation are due on Tuesday, May 27, 2014. To a large extent, these are comments that merchants and manufacturers should be making rather than consumers, and we understand that the vendors are being mobilized to do it. However, we have determined that it would be useful for consumers to make one particular comment in response to that, as appears below.

For those who do not know, the Paperwork Reduction Act is intended to force regulators to consider the costs of merely doing the paperwork and such needed to comply with a regulation (i.e., not the actual substantive requirements of the regulation). We believe that FDA has used completely inappropriate estimates for the paperwork costs of this regulation. In particular, they have estimated that there will be only 25 applications for premarket review of new tobacco products filed in connection with e-cigarette products. They have estimated very low numbers for the various other filings -- not as low as 25, but far fewer than there are merchants and products.