The greatest legislative threat to vaping at the state level over the past four years has been PMTA registry bills—that would effectively ban over 90 percent of the market by tying product availability to the FDA’s dysfunctional approval system.
The federal agency has authorized just a handful of vaping options under its Premarket Tobacco Product Applications (PMTA) process—often outmoded and unpopular, almost entirely tobacco-flavored and all owned by tobacco companies.
Registry laws have already shut down independent vape shops in Louisiana and Kentucky, slashing access and options for people who want to quit smoking and stay quit. They will soon take effect in North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.
April, however, offered a reminder that battles over safer nicotine products can still be won—at least to a degree, and even if the decision-makers still don’t quite get it.
“At this point, according to this bill, I’d be better off opening a store and selling cigarettes. Death. You’d leave me alone.”
In Tennessee and North Dakota, lawmakers who once seemed poised to impose strict PMTA registries changed course. The shift, it’s true, was driven largely by concerns about protecting domestic manufacturing and local businesses. Still, its real-world effect was to preserve access to harm reduction for hundreds of thousands of adults in those states who rely on vapes to stay off cigarettes.
In Tennessee, harm reduction advocates and local vape shop owners spent months warning of the consequences of the state’s proposed vape registry. They testified that banning vaping options based on regulatory technicalities—rather than actual health risks—would push people back to smoking, or into genuine illicit markets that present risks of their own.
Bill Livezey, owner of Knoxville Vapor, told legislators hearing the bill, “At this point, according to this bill, I’d be better off opening a store and selling cigarettes. Death. You’d leave me alone and nobody’d bother me.”
Speaking to a local news channel, Denise McIntyre of Chattanooga Vapor Co. described feeling “discouraged, scared, worried,” emphasizing that the products under threat had helped her—and her customers—to stay smoke-free.
Despite these warnings, the registry measure sailed through committee after committee, powered by concerns over a market “flooded with illicit vapes that are overwhelmingly manufactured and exported from China,” as the bill’s sponsor put it.
Coffey County Sheriff Chad Partin escalated the alarmist rhetoric with pure speculation. “It could be the same chemist making this chemical up that’s making fentanyl in the same glassware and getting shipped over here,” he claimed. The image stuck.
It wasn’t a clean win, to say the least. The compromise was driven by politics, not public health.
Momentum shifted only after industry advocates responded by convincing legislators to pursue a narrower proposal: Ban vaping products containing e-liquids or chemical ingredients from federally designated “foreign adversaries” like China, while still allowing US-made e-liquids and domestically filled disposables manufactured in FDA-registered facilities. The revised plan would block Chinese-filled disposables unless they received federal authorization, while sparing domestic options.
It wasn’t a clean win, to say the least. The compromise was driven by politics, not public health. And federal uncertainty still clouds the future of vapes—wherever they’re made. But the bill does preserve a legal path for adults in Tennessee to access a reasonable range of safer nicotine alternatives in various flavors. The bill awaits the signature of Governor Bill Lee (R).
Tennessee’s compromise couldn’t have come at a better time for vapers in North Dakota, where lawmakers were days from a final vote on implementing their own PMTA registry.
Unlike Tennessee, the North Dakota proposal did not move through the normal legislative process. At the request of Attorney General Drew H. Wrigley (R), registry language was quietly inserted into his budget bill. Lawmakers were told the amendment had support from “the industry”—a claim that reflected backing from tobacco giant Altria, which owns the FDA-authorized NJOY products.
At the 11th hour, North Dakota advocates began urging legislators to pursue a similar “Made in America” approach. Their pressure helped bring forward an amendment modeled on Tennessee’s solution—prompting some legislators to finally question the original plan.
On the House floor, Rep. Dan Ruby (R-Minot) said, “When something is discovered that is detrimental, we would be derelict in our duties not to [fix it].” Rep. Mike Motschenbacher (R-Bismarck) asked whether lawmakers were prepared to “create a registry for all the alcohol distributors” and “ban Mike’s Hard Lemonade because kids like lemonade.”
Instead of quietly advancing, the bill was sent back to committee for further discussion. On April 28, the committee voted unanimously to strike the vape language. While members made clear the issue will likely return next session, this year’s effort to restrict access was defeated.
The politicians’ decisions owed more to a desire to lean into US trade wars than to any desire to reduce smoking-related deaths.
A rose-tinted take would be that the outcomes in Tennessee and North Dakota were a rejection of fear-driven policymaking. Regrettably, that was not the case.
Registry proposals built on alarmism and misinformation still moved easily through committees. Comparisons between nicotine products and fentanyl shaped debate. Harm reduction options were still treated as liabilities, while cigarettes went untouched. And the politicians’ decisions owed more to a desire to lean into US trade wars than to any desire to reduce smoking-related deaths.
In that climate, vapers and small businesses that help people quit smoking were forced to adapt their messaging as a deeply unsatisfying survival strategy. They refuse to be written out, but they know their partial victory did not come because reason prevailed.
For now, over 650,000 adult vapers in Tennessee and North Dakota will continue to have choices beyond cigarettes. The forces that pushed these bans forward have not gone away.
Photograph (cropped) by Tiia Monto via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0
The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, has received unrestricted grants from Altria. The author was formerly the president of the American Vaping Association, which also made donations to The Influence Foundation. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.
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