Republican Rep. Jeff Weninger knew no one would be completely happy with his vaping regulation bill when he proposed it earlier this year.
For years, Arizona lawmakers have tried to rein in unregulated nicotine products, especially those popular with minors. But each attempt has stalled amid pushback from various stakeholders.
Yesterday, lawmakers voted to send Gov. Katie Hobbs vaping legislation shaped, in part, by the industry it aims to regulate.
“I look at a lot of legislation down here like it's a football game, and if you're starting at the one-yard line and you can get 40 yards down the field this year, why wouldn't you take it?” Weninger told his colleagues in February, arguing they should take whatever progress they can get now, even if it’s not perfect.
The bill does not limit selling vapes to the "Winged Victory” statue.
Weninger’s bill sets up a licensing system through the state liquor department for manufacturers and distributors of alternative nicotine products, such as vapes and nicotine pouches, while increasing the penalties for those caught selling to minors.
The bill does not, however, license the stores that sell distributors’ nicotine products. So unlike a bar that can lose its liquor license for selling alcohol to minors, a smoke shop would not have a nicotine license to lose.
That retailer carveout was one of several ways the final bill differed from the version Weninger first proposed.
The final version:
Dropped a proposed requirement that sellers electronically scan customers’ IDs before selling nicotine products.
Licenses the companies making or distributing nicotine products, instead of licensing retailers.
Only requires companies to attest that they’ve submitted an FDA marketing application, rather than requiring products to have FDA approval or be made in a certified facility.
The part of the bill restricting vape marketing to kids largely remained consistent: Nicotine products cannot use minor-targeted branding such as cartoons, toys or video games.
Some of the vapes the FDA has flagged as a “shamelessly egregious attempt to target kids.” (FDA press release, August 2023).
But one of the big wins for Big Vape was that this year’s vape regulation doesn’t stop vape companies from selling fun flavors, even if they could entice kids.
While federal regulators have effectively banned fruit and candy flavors that appeal to minors, flavored vapes still line smoke-shop shelves across the country, and many of them are illegal imports from China.
Last month, the FDA announced a new strategy for curbing illegal imports: Instead of trying to keep every unapproved vape off the market, the agency said it generally won’t penalize companies selling unauthorized products as long as they have a legitimate application pending with the FDA.
The new policy could unleash hundreds more vapes and nicotine pouches onto the U.S. market.
The decision came conspicuously soon after Reynolds American, the tobacco company behind Vuse vapes, donated $5 million to a Trump-backed super PAC, and days after tobacco executives and lobbyists aired their complaints to Trump over lunch at his Florida golf club, per the New York Times.
The nicotine industry has also found a receptive audience at the Arizona Capitol, where industries have long helped shape their own rules.
Uber and Lyft, for example, negotiated a 2015 law that gave rideshare companies lighter regulations than taxi services. Airbnb has shaped the state’s short-term rental guardrails. And Google literally wrote a bill that was introduced earlier this year to regulate kidfluencers on platforms like YouTube.
While lawmakers often rely on industry input to avoid unintended consequences, some opponents said the nicotine regulation bill is too friendly to nicotine sellers.
“We've got to do something about this industry,” Democratic Sen. Mitzi Epstein said when voting against the bill. “But this bill is allowing Big Tobacco to try to regulate themselves.”
For Weninger, deterring youth vaping was always the main goal. His daughter just graduated high school, and he knows how common vaping in school bathrooms has become.
“I'm not a big regulation guy, but you shouldn’t be able to be selling to minors, and you shouldn't be able to have cartoon products and games built into vapes,” he said.
But the compromise Weninger’s fellow House members passed yesterday was influenced by the industry selling some of the vapes kids are sneaking into school bathrooms.
Vape industry lobbyists advocated for the bill at its committee hearings, including representatives from the Vapor Technology Association, a group that advocates for vape-friendly laws at the state and federal levels, and Arizona Innovates, a newly formed vaping advocacy group.
Seasoned Capitol lobbyist Jim Norton made the broader industry case on behalf of Arizona Innovates: vape sellers support regulations to keep nicotine away from kids, as long as the rules don’t threaten legal businesses.
“I think we can all agree that an orderly marketplace is in everyone's interest,” he told lawmakers. “We need to allow innovation, like we have done in the spirituous liquor area, but with a controlled marketplace where we are protecting children from marketing.”
Norton’s work wasn’t limited to committee testimony. His firm, Garrison48, spent $1,700 on food and drinks for 17 Republican lawmakers on behalf of Arizona Innovates last year, according to the group’s lobbyist disclosure report.
The heavier lobbying push was a shift for the vape industry, which has usually played defense against stricter proposals to limit Arizona vape sales to a registry of pre-approved products.
Amid the parade of industry support, Brian Hummell, a lobbyist for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, was one of the only speakers who routinely showed up to oppose the bill.
He argued the bill raises penalties for selling to minors without giving the Liquor Department money to enforce the new rules. And while it moves nicotine licensing to the liquor agency, it stops short of the tobacco-retailer licensing system most states use to track sellers and fund inspections.
Hummell said he’s noticed the industry becoming “more savvy” in its messaging, including the recently adopted messaging around protecting kids.
“We're trying to keep these out of the hands of kids,” he said. “So if that's the narrative, why wouldn't we listen to public health organizations that have been working on this kind of stuff literally for decades, as opposed to the industry itself that created the problem?”
That sentiment is not lost on Republican Rep. Teresa Martinez, who ran a rival nicotine regulation bill that would have limited Arizona vape sales to a state-approved product list, which the vape industry has long opposed. She framed it as a way to keep illicit Chinese-made vapes out of the state.
At the bill’s committee hearing, Norton from Arizona Innovates called it a “Byzantine requirement” that would punish businesses trying to follow the law while doing little to stop smugglers already ignoring it.
Lobbyist Tom Dorn, representing the Vapor Technology Association, said the industry was already trying to “self-regulate.”
Martinez didn’t buy it.
“Self-regulation?” she said. “I wish the IRS would allow us to self-regulate.”
Carpe per diem: State lawmakers got $170,000 in per diem payments while they weren’t working, the Republic’s Helen Rummel reports. The 60 state reps took home a collective $110,000 in per diem payments and the 30 senators (who showed up once a week) got $60,000 during their self-imposed, month-long break that ended this week.
Historic housing shortage: State lawmakers nixed a bill that would have protected historic neighborhoods from being turned into multifamily housing, per Capitol Media Services’ Bob Christie. Residents of historic neighborhoods were worried their homes would be torn down as cities implement the “middle housing” law that took effect this year to help alleviate the housing shortage. But developers and housing advocates convinced lawmakers to kill the bill, even after the bill’s sponsor GOP Rep. Matt Gress watered it down. Elsewhere in housing legislation, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed into law a bill from GOP Sen. Wendy Rogers that would make it easier to remove “squatters” from residential property, per KTAR’s Balin Overstolz McNair.
Claude, what’s the easiest way to screw over sick people?: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued nine health insurance providers for using AI to pay as little as possible to healthcare providers, which drove up costs for patients, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports. The third-party billing company MultiPlan used information from insurance companies to figure out the lowest payments and then shared that data with insurance companies, which Mayes says violates anti-trust laws.
Claude, how do I finish what offshoring started? Phoenix turned itself into the call center capital of the country — or what the Wall Street Journal calls “America’s back office” — but AI is coming to tear all that down as call center companies replace humans with AI tools that don’t need breaks or health insurance.
Show me a video, or it didn’t happen: In what is definitely not a good sign for transparency, more than half of Arizona’s public school districts contacted by ASU’s new news outlet, The Beam, either don’t record their meetings or only provide recordings if they’re requested. Even worse, three districts said they destroy recordings of official meetings before they’re legally allowed to do it. When districts depend on meeting minutes, instead of recordings, they often come out sanitized and don’t capture the drama of the meetings.
The managing editor of Votebeat had the same reaction to Arizona’s Capitol building as we did the first time we walked inside.
Nathaniel Rakich has been to 24 state capitols and Arizona’s is “the worst so far.”
Former Votebeat Arizona reporter Jen Fifield chimed in with her own (accurate) take on the Capitol building:
“So what I’m hearing is you’re not into concrete, bad carpet, and a panorama of the grand canyon that has been split into so many vertical banners that the beauty of the scene has been entirely destroyed?” Fifield wrote.