A Dissolvable Loophole

Tobacco products are a lot like antagonists in a slasher flick; they just won’t die. When the government puts pressure on tobacco companies to regulate, discontinue or alter their products, they companies always find some way to slither around things.

Star Scientific Inc., is a small tobacco company that specializes in dissolvable tobacco products. We have all learned about these recently because the bigger tobacco companies just started making them once the FDA became involved in regulating cigarettes, but Star has been making these products since 2001. Since the bigger companies jumped in the dissolvable and smokeless tobacco game, the FDA has since begun regulating those products as well. But Star just got cut a lucky break….

According to a recent article, Star Scientific Inc. just learned that two of their products are not subject to FDA regulations through technicalities. The products, Ariva-BDL and Stonewall-BDL, are both dissolvable tobacco products. This means that both these products will no longer be tested, regulated and assessed by the government. Instead, they can go straight to the shelf without any governmental, scientific testing. For tobacco users, this means that these products don’t need to adhere to any imposed standards and can contain any number of chemicals that the manufacturer sees fit.

After news of this loophole broke, the company’s stock went up 34 cents. Tobacco investors know that deregulation cuts a ton of overhead and gives complete control of the product back to the company. On the other side of the coin, Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said the FDA unnecessarily created a loophole in the law that opens up a “real threat of significant abuse” and leads the way for bigger companies to create unregulated products.