Oregon will ban all flavored vaping products for six months starting Tuesday as federal officials remain stumped about exactly what’s causing severe lung injuries associated with e-cigarettes.

The action followed Gov. Kate Brown’s order last week that the Oregon Liquor Control Commission and the Oregon Health Authority temporarily ban the products -- including those with THC, the active chemical in marijuana, CBD and those with nicotine.

Only vaping products that taste like marijuana or tobacco can continue. If in the coming weeks or months investigators connect other products to lung injuries, they will also be banned, the governor said.

Nicotine and marijuana retailers violating the ban could be fined up to $500 per day per violation, according to the two agencies. Cannabis retailers could also lose their license.

In a joint statement, the regulators said the temporary rules “are significant steps toward stemming the well-documented tide of e-cigarette use and vaping by youth, as well as keeping products that may expose people to unsafe chemicals and other contaminants off store shelves.”

The Oregon Health Authority noted that among high school students in the state who use e-cigarettes exclusively, nearly 90 percent use flavored e-cigarette products, with “strong evidence” that e-cigarettes increase youth nicotine addiction and the risk that they’ll start smoking.

“We have been warning Oregonians about the health effects of these products before this current outbreak of serious lung injury added more evidence of the dangers of vaping,” said Dean Sidelinger, health officer and state epidemiologist.

“These rules stop the sale of a potentially dangerous product, and they’re part of a comprehensive approach to curbing youth vaping and additional cases of vaping-associated lung injuries,” he said in a statement.

FLAVORED MARIJUANA VAPING BAN

OLCC chair Paul Rosenbaum told the people packed into the commission’s meeting room Friday that his board’s goal was to not get in the way of the legal marijuana industry. But the agency’s first concern always must be safety, he said.

“The public health and safety of the constituents of this state are the most important thing that we have,” Rosenbaum said.

The OLCC will conduct retail inspections starting Oct. 15, the agency’s compliance director said. Under the temporary rules, marijuana retailers and processors that keep making or selling the products could face a raft of regulatory penalties, up to losing their license.

The flavored THC-product ban includes all vape products flavored with chemicals that aren’t extracted from marijuana, even if the chemicals extracted from other plants are identical to the ones found naturally in marijuana.

TJ Sheehy, manager of OLCC’s marijuana technical unit, said the ban would cover about 10 percent of the marijuana market.

John Thompson, owner of the vape oil production company Sublime Solutions, said he was disappointed by the decision.

“I may lose my business next week,” Thompson said.

Most of what his company produces, he said, includes flavor chemicals, called terpenes, that are extracted from plants other than marijuana.

To give marijuana oils a natural taste, producers can extract terpenes from marijuana and then reintroduce them to vape oils. But terpene varieties in some marijuana strains can be extracted from other plants that aren’t as expensive to process. The ban would include vape juice with such chemicals.

Marijuana businesses are highly regulated. The OLCC tracks and tests legal marijuana products, including THC vaping products. Every business in the legal production chain is licensed with the agency.

FLAVORED NICOTINE VAPING BAN

The Oct. 15 ban on nicotine vaping products -- both those bought in stores and online -- falls under the Oregon Health Authority.

It covers all products that contain “natural or artificial flavors,” including chocolate, menthol, mint, fruit and a variety of other flavors.

E-cigarettes with nicotine have flooded the retail market in recent years and have been linked to a rise in youth use of the products. Nicotine liquids come in a wide variety of flavors, such as mango, vanilla and blueberry, and can contain concentrations of nicotine that far exceed conventional cigarettes.

Oregon is one of few states that doesn’t have a centralized tobacco and nicotine e-cigarette retailer oversight system, leaving most regulation of tobacco sales to the cities and counties that decide independently to regulate them.

That lack of regulation means the Oregon Health Authority doesn’t generally have an accurate and current list of nicotine product retailers or where they are and who owns them.

Sidelinger said the agency is confident in its estimate that there are 4,000 retailers statewide. The agency recently contacted local health departments to partner on enforcement.

“We don’t have as strong a regulatory control with these retailers so it’s going to take us more time to step up this effort,” Sidelinger said.

At the moment, the health authority contracts with Oregon State Police to inspect about 1,500 retailers a year for sales to minors, according to a report state officials submitted to the federal government this year.

The health authority continued to urge people seeking to quit nicotine to call 1-800-QUIT-NOW, a service that gives people a free coaching session on how to quit and helps them get insurance to pay for replacement therapy. Those without insurance can get two weeks of free patches or gum.

“We continue to get the message out that nobody should vape,” Sidelinger said.

Paying for some vape products at Division Vapor’s register Friday, Ron Johnson, 56, lamented what he predicted would be the unintended consequence of the ban.

“We’re going to turn back to cigarettes,” Johnson said.

He turned to vaping about two years ago after nearly two decades smoking tobacco. Despite the abundance of flavored products on the shelves, Johnson opted for tobacco-flavored e-juice.

“I’ve got to get used to it,” he said.

Paul Bates owns the shop. The store will go out of business, Bates said, unless there’s a court order to stay the ban. At least 95% of his products would likely fall into the ban. Even the tobacco-flavored juice has chemicals that add undertones of vanilla, caramel and the like. Bates said he expects vape shops to sue the state in the hopes that the ban will be put on hold or eliminated altogether.

He blasted what he said was a complete absence of a scientific rationale behind the flavored nicotine vaping products ban. The lung illness epidemic has been tied almost exclusively to THC products, he pointed out, and vaping products have genuinely helped many people quit tobacco, he said.

The inevitable outcome, Bates said, was that people would turn back to smoking cigarettes.

“This will not serve public health in any way, shape or form,” he said.

WHAT WE KNOW

Oregon now officially joins a host of states that have banned or tried to ban flavored e-cigarettes, including Washington, even as the cause of the epidemic remains unknown.

The first death, in Illinois, was announced Aug. 23. The second death, in Oregon, was announced in early September, although the person died in July.

Officials say they know of 1,299 people in 49 states who have fallen ill and 26 who have died from lung disease connected to vaping.

As of Tuesday, nine Oregonians have fallen ill and two have died. Five of them bought THC products at legal retail stores. State health officials have cautioned against coming to conclusions about Oregon’s legal marijuana vaping products.

State health agencies are coordinating with the federal government to collect samples from patients and interview them to try to solve the mystery.

Almost four in five lung injury victims nationally used vape pens with THC, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

The CDC’s partner agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said that almost half of the samples they tested included Vitamin E acetate, a chemical used to dilute vape oils. Vitamin E acetate was identified early on in the outbreak as a potential cause of lung injury. To turn into a vapor, the chemical must be heated up to such a high temperature that it can turn back into a liquid in the lungs before the blood can absorb it.

But no one chemical has been found across the samples that the FDA has tested, the agency said Friday.

The illness has so baffled health officials and researchers, in fact, that up until the start of this month, it was thought to be caused by oil droplets lodged in people’s lungs. That theory took a hit last week when a group of doctors published findings showing that their patients’ lung reactions looked like exposure to toxic chemicals, not oils.

The key components to e-cigarettes are a heating element and “e-juice,” the liquid that contains the active ingredients nicotine or THC, flavorings and compounds that affect how the vapor feels when inhaled. The device’s heating element activates and turns the liquid into a vapor, which then delivers the chemicals into the person’s lungs.

-- Fedor Zarkhin

fzarkhin@oregonian.com

desk: 503-294-7674|cell: 971-373-2905|@fedorzarkhin

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