Less than two weeks after it announced Juul e-cigarettes must be removed from the U.S. market, the Food and Drug Administration has lifted its ban on the products, allowing them to return to store shelves.
In June, the FDA ordered the company to pull its products, saying Juul has failed to submit evidence the e-cigs were safe. The company asked for a stay to that order, but the FDA denied it. That led to a court battle, where an appeals court judge temporarily stayed that ruling the next day. Now the FDA is pumping the brakes itself.
On Twitter, the agency said it had stayed the order as it had “determined that there are scientific issues unique to the Juul application that warrant additional review.” The FDA noted that this was a suspension of its order, but it was not rescinding it.
Juul, in its court filing, accused the FDA of overlooking over 6,000 pages of data and said the initial ruling came about due to political pressure.
Juul has been in the spotlight for four years and was one of the first e-cigarette companies to come under fire. Officials blamed it for the rise in underage vaping, due to its advertising and sweet/fruity flavors. It did away with those flavors three years ago.
Juul, as of last fall, accounted for nearly half of the $4 billion U.S. market but sales have fallen sharply from when the company controlled more than 75%.
E-cigarettes first appeared in the U.S. more than a decade ago with the promise of providing smokers with a less harmful alternative to smoking traditional tobacco cigarettes. The devices heat a nicotine solution into a vapor that’s inhaled. But there has been little rigorous study of whether the e-cigarettes truly help smokers quit.
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