The latest debacle embarrassing the vaping world has to do with a couple of boneheaded e-liquid manufacturers who had the not-so-bright idea of manufacturing a line of e-liquids purposefully styled to look like bottles of cough syrup. It's difficult to imagine how much wacky tobaccy one would have to smoke in order to reach the state of mind from which that would seem like a good idea. Just from a marketing perspective alone, cough syrup hardly conjures up images of deliciousness that set your mouth to watering and make you want to vape it. Cough syrup is something you gag down in order to ease your wheezing.
In any case, on April 4th, 2019, the FDA duly issued a press release informing the world, no doubt with a heavy sigh, that it was taking action against these products.
"By deliberately making or selling e-liquid products that look like prescription cough syrups, these companies are putting adults and children at risk of nicotine poisoning. The products are being designed in ways that make them falsely appear to be ingestible. These actions are egregious," the press release scolded.
"The products not only use labeling with statements, representations and graphical elements that imitate legitimate cough medications, but they also have a list of ingredients that mimics a drug facts label." Seriously, it's a wonder that the FDA was able to restrain itself from using exclamation points at the end of some of these sentences.
And the FDA wasn't exaggerating. The vape juice bottles really do mimic cough syrup right down to the type face.
In fact, the impersonation is so blatant, it's astonishing that the vape juice company hadn't already been slapped with a trade mark violation suit from the makers of Prometh VC With Codeine. Notice how the "V" snuggled inside the curve of the "C" near the top right of the label has been cleverly replaced with the word "vape." The product has also been cunningly rebranded as "E-Juice Syrup" instead of e-liquid.
The pineapple version is even more blatant and even less appealing. One is left with the impression that someone with a nasty viral infection was overcome by an unfortunate urge to sneeze with nary a tissue in sight.
Not only do these products put people at risk of mistakenly ingesting e-juice and ending up in the emergency room with nicotine poisoning when what they really wanted was relief from hacking up a lung, it's also just plain stupid. Nothing could be better designed to poke the FDA anti-vaping hornet's nest than mimicking a prescription drug label. Let's not forget, the "D" in F-D-A stands for "drug."
"Efforts to encourage the innovation of novel and potentially less harmful products such as e-cigarettes for currently addicted adult smokers will be severely undermined if bad actors put the public, and kids in particular, at risk in this outrageous fashion," the FDA press release stated.
We couldn't agree more. Plus, it's stupid. Did we say that already?
If you want to see another example of the same kind of astute thinking that brought E-Juice Syrup to the world, check out our previous blog post, "Is That An E-Cig in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?" Yes. It gets worse.
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