Reversing The FDA’s Vape Decision Would Hand The Market To Chinese Smugglers

Contraband behaves like water: it finds the lowest, easiest path, and when you close one channel, it pools somewhere else. Anyone who has worked a port of entry knows it in their bones. It is also the lesson a group of U.S. senators seems determined to ignore.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did something it had never done before. After years of scientific review, it authorized four vaping products made by Glas Inc., an American company in Inglewood, California—including two non-tobacco flavors. To earn that authorization, Glas had to clear the FDA’s premarket review and build in age controls most bars would envy: government-ID verification, Bluetooth pairing to a registered phone, and random biometric check-ins to keep the device out of kids’ hands.

Within days, ten senators demanded the agency reverse itself and pull the products from shelves.

The instinct is understandable. Nobody wants teenagers vaping. But any law enforcement expert on smuggling will tell you where this road leads, and it is not where these senators think.

Here is the reality on the ground. Americans who want flavored vapes are not going to be talked out of them by a letter from Washington. The only real question is whether they buy a regulated product that answers to the FDA, or an unregulated one smuggled in from China. Right now the smugglers are winning in a rout.

The FDA itself estimates that a majority of vapes sold in this country are illegal, and mainly imported from China. Roughly 80 percent of the Chinese e-cigarette exports pouring into the United States arrive with no FDA authorization at all, and in 2025 those exports topped $10 billion. About 6,000 different vape products sit on American shelves, but only around 40 are legal.

The black market is the market— overwhelmingly Chinese, overwhelmingly flavored, and overwhelmingly reaching the customers, including kids, that everyone claims to want to protect. Customs and Border Protection recently seized more than $175 million of these illegal devices in a single joint operation. They keep coming because the math is irresistible to the people shipping them: one seizure of three million vapes amounted to about four percent of a single month’s Chinese exports.

Now consider what happens if Washington yanks the few legal, American-made, age-gated products off the shelves. The demand does not vanish. It flows to the Shenzhen-made disposable with a cartoon on the box, no ID check, and nobody accountable on this side of the Pacific.

We do not have to theorize. Massachusetts ran the experiment. After the state banned flavored tobacco and vapes, sales did not disappear. They simply crossed the border.

Cigarette sales in neighboring New Hampshire jumped 22 percent the following year. Massachusetts climbed from twelfth to fourth in the nation for inbound smuggling. Illegal-vape seizures by the state’s own task force more than quadrupled in two years, and the state lost roughly a fifth of its tobacco-tax revenue. Consumption hardly budged. It just went underground and out of state.

This is the oldest story in American governance. We tried banning a popular product once before, from 1920 to 1933. Prohibition did not end drinking. It gave us Al Capone, bathtub gin, and a generation of organized crime—and then we repealed it. Policymakers wisely concluded that a legal, taxed, accountable product beats a banned one run by violent criminals.

The senators looking to ban flavored vapes have the equation backwards. The threat to American kids is not a California company submitting to FDA review and biometric age locks. The threat is the flood of anonymous Chinese disposables that ignore every rule on the books. Reversing the FDA’s decision would not dam that flood, but it would eliminate its only legal competition and guarantee the smugglers a captive market.

Youth vaping has already fallen to its lowest level in over a decade, around five percent of students, down sharply from the peaks of a few years ago, and without a single new flavor ban. The trend they say they fear is already moving in the right direction.

If our governments are serious about curbing illicit vapes and protecting kids, they should enforce against the illegal market and let the legal, accountable one compete. Handing China the field is not regulation. It is surrender.

Evan Swarztrauber is Principal at CorePoint Strategies, a technology and telecommunications policy firm.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.