A Sept. 15 Food & Drug Administration press release notes the agency “has taken action against 55 tobacco retailers by issuing the first warning letters for selling newly regulated tobacco products, such as e-cigarettes, e-liquids and cigars, to minors.”

The FDA compliance-check program aims to assure that retailers – both brick-and-mortar and online – don’t sell tobacco products to children. If a retailer is noncompliant, the FDA issues a warning letter; subsequent violations can result in a fine, and the “FDA may pursue a No-Tobacco-Sale Order (NTSO) against retailers that have a total of five or more repeated violations of certain restrictions within 36 months.”

Let’s take a look at the compliance results for the past two years. Data is reported for fiscal years (Oct. 1 to Sept. 30), so the 2015 data are complete, while the 2016 data extend only to Aug. 31.

So far this year, 89 percent of retailers have been compliant in 151,190 inspections. Warning letters resulted from 9 percent (n = 13,124) of inspections, and fines have been levied to another 3,015 retailers (2 percent). As the chart shows, these numbers are almost identical to those from 2015.

fda-inspections-091516

It’s noteworthy that these results are substantially worse than five years ago, when the FDA was just starting its compliance program. In 2011, I examined data from 16 states that showed an overall compliance rate of 96 percent. By now, the rate should have risen to near 100 percent; it is unacceptable that it has fallen to 89 percent.

By extrapolation, nine out of 10 retailers in the U.S. do not sell tobacco products to children. As a society, we should not tolerate the fact that 10 percent of retailers put children at risk. The percentage should be zero.


Image by CarmenKarin / Shutterstock.com

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