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........

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