Is Limiting The Market To FDA-Authorized E-Cigarette Products A Step in The Right Direction?

Hawai‘i State Attorney General Anne Lopez addressing the crowd at the State Capitol on Take Down Tobacco Day, March 18, 2026.

Since 2017, the rising rate of e-cigarette use among Hawai‘i youth has been a major concern for the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Hawai‘i. Youth rates peaked in 2019, when Hawai‘i had some of the highest vaping rates in the nation, with 30.6% of high school students and 17.7% of middle school students using e-cigarettes. For years, our coalition has worked to reverse this alarming trend by trying to end the sale of flavored tobacco products in the state of Hawai‘i, but for one reason or another, those efforts haven’t succeeded.

E-cigarette products are considered tobacco products and are therefore regulated by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Whether or not an e-cigarette product can be legally sold in the United States is determined through the FDA’s Premarket Tobacco Product Authorization (PMTA) process. Applying for authorization can be lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive for manufacturers, but the process centers on the question: Will the product be a “benefit for public health?” The evaluation weighs how effective a product is at helping adult smokers switch away from combustible cigarettes against how appealing it might be to young people, particularly children and teens who don’t currently smoke. Millions of e-cigarette products have been denied authorization for failing to meet this criterion. Yet despite being denied, the majority of these unauthorized, illegal products remain available for purchase across the country, and the FDA acknowledges it does not have the enforcement capacity to remove them all from shelves.

This untenable situation has opened the door to a new legislative initiative supported by the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Hawai‘i this year. HB1573, drafted by our State Attorney General’s office, clarifies which e-cigarettes can be legally sold in Hawai‘i and grants enforcement authority to remove illegal products from local store shelves. Unlike many other states’ e-cigarette registry bills, Hawai‘i’s version will only allow products that have received FDA authorization and marketing orders to be sold. Many other states’ registry laws also permit products that have applied for authorization but have not yet received it, leaving thousands of products on the market. Hawai‘i’s bill includes no such provision. It strictly limits sales to the current list of FDA-authorized products, which, as of June 2026, includes just 45. 

HB 1573 drew support from lawmakers in both the House and Senate. Remarkably, after passing the House and then the Senate, it didn’t need to go to conference committee. After final reading, it went straight to the governor’s desk, where it now awaits signature. Once signed, Hawai‘i will become the first state in the nation to allow only FDA-authorized e-cigarette products to be sold, with the authority to remove all other unauthorized products from shelves. 

Of course, there are risks to this approach, and the elephant in the room is the recent chaos at the FDA itself. On May 5, 2026, the FDA authorized the first e-cigarette products with flavors other than tobacco and menthol. The announcement was met with concern and outrage across the tobacco prevention and control world, and even led to the resignation of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. Taken on its own, this particular authorization — a technologically age-gated device that must be linked to a user’s phone to verify age, with pods sold as “Gold” (mango) and “Sapphire” (blueberry) — is a lopsided compromise in our favor, if we can succeed in clearing our local market of the thousands of flavored products that have driven Hawai‘i’s youth vaping epidemic for the past six years. But if this signals that the FDA is making an about-face and preparing to flood the market with flavored products, we may have to go back to the drawing board. 

As things stand today, limiting the market to FDA-authorized products is a step in the right direction. Will it still be in 2027 and 2028? Only time will tell.