Juul has been the cause of Teens becoming addicted to Vaping, not only that yet has caused an epidemic in Vaping Illnesses and now a death. Juul refuses to list what exactly is in their E-Juice extracts and oil, one can surmise is, “While the cause of the lung-related illnesses are being investigated, testing completed by the FDA indicates these recent events are linked to black market THC cartridges, and presumably, a thickening agent named Vitamin E Acetate (found in counterfeit vaping oil — NOT legitimate and regulated eLiquid products sold today).” – Quoted from Liquid Barn and FDA
On Sept. 9, the Food and Drug Administration sent Juul a warning letter accusing the company of violating federal regulations by promoting its e-cigarettes as a safer option than traditional cigarettes and threatening the company with fines and product seizures if it continued. Two days later, the Trump Administration said it planned to pull from the market flavored e-cigarettes such as Juul’s mango, creme and mint pods.
However, the Trump administration and Pelosi/Dems wants to put a total ban on E-flavor liquids due to the rising epidemic of illnesses and a death. Notice that we have never had this issue before JUUL promoted themselves as a safer method of vaping industry. You would think the Trump Administration would rather place JUUL out of business instead of banning everything all together, yet, that’s just not the case.
The Trump Administration has the information and data on JUUL, they know where the illegal vape juice product is being produced and marketed. They know the FDA has done a full investigation and has turned up with the damning results – that Vitamin E Acetate and THC are the culprits.
Bans do not work, it did not work with gambling, alcohol, and it didn’t work with marijuana. Bans didn’t work in the past, they aren’t working now. There are always loop holes and black markets.
Restrictions and Regulations however, do in fact work. Raising the age level on when someone could vape should be at 21, like with Cigarettes and Alcohol – ID required at time of purchase on Website buys and offline. (Liquid Barn, Vape Wild and Central Vapors already do these things). Maybe we should look towards the parents as well. Maybe Parents should pay more attention to their teens activities on the web, since, incidentally this is where it has all taken place.
Teens do not make good choices – THAT IS FACT. Another fact is parents seem to think they can “Trust” their teens because they “think” they have “raised” them with a decent head on their shoulders. I hate to break it to you even the good ones go dark – and party behind backs. Pay Attention.
Vaping is not Lethal when you get your products from a legitimate source. Vaping is not a problem when you study the ins and outs, the pros and cons. The instructions on how to use a vape pen or make E-juice.
I have been vaping for years, it has helped me quit smoking Cigarettes. Cigarettes which contain chemicals that cause cancer – where Vape has natural ingredients and unbleached Nicotine. (pure and untainted) Now I’m not saying Vape doesn’t have a draw back, it does, there are cases where the Mods have malfunctioned, or there have been bad nicotine deliveries. Things can happen either way, yet what these kids have been doing is all round idiotic and dangerous.
A majority of kids have mixed THC and the E Acetate with – Weed and high nicotine volume in a regular mod- which has caused the thickening of the Vape Cloud – Which causes Popcorn lung. The fact is regular mods were not designed for Weed, there is actually a special Pen for said Weed. If they had actually done research, and not gone to the black market dank carts or to JUUL, this would not have been an issue.
The point I’m trying to make – to summarize, stop allowing your kids to do as they wish. Start being the Helicopter as you were when they were little. Because I hate to say it – SHIT HAPPENS when unsupervised. And it’s a parents responsibility to ensure the SAFETY of their kids.
Vaping has saved millions of people lives with flavors being one of the major reasons due to their sweet flavors. We the people know that legal vape products that have been regulated are 95% safer than traditional cigarettes. Bans and prohibition has never worked, whether it is with cannabis or alcohol or drugs.
As you may be aware, vaping has come under fire recently after new health reports swarmed the media, leading to a general panic and even legislation banning the sale of flavored eLiquids in the state of Michigan.
This week, President Trump announced his intention for a federal flavored e-Liquid ban, further inciting the need for our community to band together against this misdirected attention.
While the cause of the lung-related illnesses are being investigated, testing completed by the FDA indicates these recent events are linked to black market THC cartridges, and presumably, a thickening agent named Vitamin E Acetate (found in counterfeit vaping oil — NOT legitimate and regulated eLiquid products sold today).
As you know, not all vapor is the same, and the frenzy of headlines and hype has resulted in negative coverage that now poses a direct threat to vapers everywhere.
Here’s the problem with a flavor ban:
Since the days of prohibition, we’ve learned that banning something usually has an adverse effect, often leading consumers to black market and unsafe measures.
And worse yet, millions of smokers who have turned to vaping as a — dare we say healthier — alternative to smoking will be faced with a new dilemma: returning to cigarettes.
It’s up to us to relay to lawmakers, local and federal, that vaping should be regulated — but not banned.
A FLORIDA TROPHY hunter has permission to import what is thought to be the first lion trophy from Tanzania since January 2016, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based nonprofit that advocates for endangered species.
In that year, two subspecies of African lions were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, meaning that those lions can be killed for trophies only if it can be shown that the hunts would enhance the survival of the species in the wild.
In May, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that oversees trophy hunting imports to the United States, approved a hunter’s application to import the skin, skull, claws, and teeth of a lion killed in Lukwati North Game Reserve, a hunting concession leased from the government and run by Tanzanian safari operator McCallum Safaris. That’s according to records obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Tanya Sanerib, international legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity. (See more from FOIA: We asked the government why animal welfare records disappeared.)
The hunter, whose identity could not be confirmed by National Geographic, originally applied to import a lion trophy from Tanzania in November 2016. It’s unclear exactly when he killed the lion. Nor is it clear whether the trophy has been imported. The permit to do so, issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service, expires in May 2020, a year after it was issued.
African lions have disappeared from 94 percent of their historic range, and populations have halved, to fewer than 25,000 since the early 1990s, according to the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Network. The main causes of the decline are retaliatory killings of lions that attack villagers and depletion of their prey animals. Tanzania is home to 40 percent of Africa’s lions.
Sanerib, who calls the country a “stronghold” for lions, worries that the decision by the Fish and Wildlife Service could be a signal that the Trump administration will “open the floodgates” for future Tanzanian trophy imports for lions and other species, including elephants. The news of this approval of a lion import comes on the heels of a decision last week to allow a U.S. hunter to import a black rhino trophy killed last year in Namibia.
According to Laury Marshall Parramore, a spokeswoman with the Fish and Wildlife Service, “Legal, well-regulated hunting as part of a sound management program can benefit the conservation of certain species by providing incentives to local communities to conserve the species and by putting much-needed revenue back into conservation.”
Sanerib says she’s concerned about the lack of detail in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s determination that this hunt enhances lion conservation in Tanzania. She claims that the service didn’t do due diligence when approving the import permit. As part of her FOIA request, she says she obtained emails in which the service asked general questions of Tanzanian government officials, such as whether they were monitoring trophy hunting.
“Those are not the basic questions that I think that our government should be asking before we approve these types of practices. We should be way down in the weeds, getting all of the details to ensure that these programs are actually going to enhance the survival of species.”
“Organizationally, we’re opposed to trophy hunting—we don’t think we should be killing threatened and endangered species,” Sanerib says. “But if we are going to do it, if it is going to happen, Fish and Wildlife Service needs to follow the law, and they really need to ensure—and this is their own regulatory requirements—that this program has all the adequate safeguards to ensure that it’s going to be sustainable for the lion population.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to a request for specific information about how this hunt benefits lions in Tanzania and for reaction to Sanerib’s concerns.
The lion decision is particularly troubling given Tanzania’s history of mismanaging trophy hunting, Sanerib says. In 2017, Hamisi Kigwangalla, Tanzania’s minister for natural resources and tourism, revoked hunting concession lease permits that previously had been issued to companies for a low set fee, citing a need for greater transparency about the process. The government then began auctioning off concession leases instead. But according to biologist Craig Packer, who had studied lions in Tanzania since the late 1970s, only undesirable concessions were put up for auction, a move he calls a “halfhearted” effort to reform.
Kigwangalla did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2015, Packer was barred from entering the country after he characterized the nation’s trophy hunting industry as corrupt. Trophy hunters are supposed to target only older male lions, thought to be less crucial to reproduction, but Packer says there was no accountability or oversight by Tanzania to ensure that this was happening. As trophy hunting declined in popularity, Packer says, concession operators charged hunters fees so low that they couldn’t possibly be providing enough revenue to maintain roads, hire rangers, and prevent illegal farming or grazing in the hunting reserves.
Whether this particular trophy import is good or bad depends on whether the hunt was shown to have a conservation benefit, Packer says. If the U.S. is rewarding responsible hunting operators, it will incentivize others to follow suit. “As long as the sport hunters are showing that they’re making a positive impact, good on them,” he says. “It would be great if the system is actually forcing some kind of reform.” But, he adds, the Fish and Wildlife Service “has no way of confirming whether Tanzania’s well-meaning policies are really being implemented.”
Representatives from the Tanzania Wildlife Authority, which implements the country’s Wildlife Conservation Act, the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute, an organization under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism that conducts wildlife research, and the Tanzania Tourist Board did not respond to requests for comment about how the country manages its trophy hunting.
John Jackson, a member of the International Wildlife Conservation Council, an advisory group to the Secretary of Interior, is the Florida hunter’s attorney. Jackson welcomes more frequent trophy imports from Tanzania and says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been “too slow” to issue these permits—a pace Jackson calls “inexcusable.” Since 2016, he says, many hunting operators have had to surrender their lands because of a lack of revenue, which leaves the animals in those lands unprotected. More frequent trophy hunts would allow concession operators to afford anti-poaching safety measures. “Hunting is the single most important mechanism to save lion,” he argues.
Jackson disagrees that Tanzania’s trophy hunting is mismanaged. As home to about 40 percent of Africa’s lions, he says, the country has “managed to save more lions than anybody else.”
“I wish there was another country equal to it,” he says. “It’s easy to criticize people, but it’s much more important to work with them and support them.”
Sanerib says Tanzania deserves credit for having a “phenomenal system” of protected areas but that its lion conservation success has been despite trophy hunting rather than because of it.
Elephants too? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s findings for lions also could apply to elephants, Sanerib says. In 2014, the Obama administration effectively banned trophy imports of elephants from Tanzania because of a poaching crisis in the country and concerns about the management of its trophy hunting industry. Sanerib says this lion trophy import decision may indicate that the Trump administration plans to overturn that ban.
In 2017, the service reversed the ban on elephant trophy imports from Zimbabwe. “So we have some history—some very recent history—to point to as evidence of them, I would say, leaping before they take a look,” Sanerib says. (After President Trump tweeted his dissatisfaction with the Zimbabwe decision, the service reversed course and decided to evaluate applications on a case-by-case basis. Since then, no elephant trophies are known to have been imported from Zimbabwe.)
Anna Frostic, the managing wildlife attorney for the Humane Society, says the decisions to issue lion and black rhino trophy import permits indicate that there are more to come. She says the Fish and Wildlife Service “is making these decisions behind closed doors and without the input of independent scientists and the public.”
“The issuance of this one lion trophy import from Tanzania will likely be replicated and applied to the more than 40 other applications for Tanzania lion trophies that are pending,” she says.
Even though Tanzania is a stronghold for lions, she says the fact that overall lion numbers are dwindling means this potential new pattern is “extremely concerning.”
“The decision to legitimize that type of activity,” Frostic says, “is not only unethical and scientifically unjustifiable but is unlawful” based on the decision’s merits and because of the service’s lack of transparency in its decision making.
The grizzly bear. The California condor. The peregrine falcon. The manatee. The humpback whale.
The American bald eagle.
All of the above species were saved by the Endangered Species Act. It’s one of America’s great success stories: scientists have concluded that without the ESA, 227 species would’ve gone extinct from 1973-2005. The ESA has a remarkable 99% success record at preventing the extinction of listed species.
We’ve reached a breaking point. In May, a U.N. panel on world biodiversity released a massive report that found 1 million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction if we don’t act to save them.
Despite all of this, the Trump administration has finalized sweeping changes to the ESA that will reduce protections for endangered animals and plants and make it easier to remove species from the endangered list. The rollback will also give industry more leeway to develop in areas where threatened wildlife live.
Guardians Of Life 
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