Anyone who’s been inside a gas station convenience store has probably noticed a shelf lined with vapes. The vast majority of them aren’t legal. In fact, of the roughly 6,000 e-cigarette products available in the U.S., only 48 are lawfully for sale.

When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) loosened its enforcement policy for vapes in May, it tacitly invited the makers of the several thousand unapproved vapes to start breaking the law. We’re now seeing the results of that non-enforcement come to life, with manufacturers openly selling unauthorized products. Nothing about the law changed. Selling those products is still illegal. The FDA simply announced it will not act.

The agency said it would “create and maintain a publicly available list” naming the unapproved products it no longer intends to prioritize for enforcement. More than three months on, there is no list. The list was the policy’s only accountability mechanism, the one measure that would let the public see the scope of what the FDA had waved through.

There is an obvious explanation. Publishing it would require the FDA to say out loud how many unauthorized products it has decided to leave alone, and the number is likely not small. An agency........

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