BRADENTON, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Totally Wicked arrived in the USA in 2008 and established the very first American brick and mortar vape shop. Since then, we have built up a credible business with a proud history of standing up for vapers’ rights. We challenged the FDA in 2010 when it was illegally impounding our goods, and in Europe in 2015 we challenged the EU Tobacco Products Directive. As a business we operate in both the EU and the USA, have a loyal customer base, offer a wide and dynamic range of hardware and e-liquids and try always to deliver the best possible service in an open and ethical way.
However, this is clearly not enough for the FDA as they actively shut down this vibrant industry. With the stroke of a pen, the FDA is demanding fantastically unrealistic pre-market tobacco authorizations for a product that contains no tobacco, at a cost that is prohibitive to all but the tobacco giants, and bears no relations to the products’ risk or indeed, its remarkable potential when compared to the raging tobacco epidemic. It is designed quite simply to destroy the industry. By the end of 2018, there will be no independent vaping industry left within the USA - unless Congress decides to look deeper into this, or indeed the legal system is willing and able to hold the FDA to account for its fallacious representation of the risk impact that it has used to justify this regulatory abomination.
In 2018 we will be forced to close our business, but we are not going away meekly. We fully intend to use what time we have left to benefit our customers and inform as many people as possible as to the scurrilous claims emanating from the FDA.
We intend to give back to all those that helped us to become successful; to their friends and relatives yet to make the switch and to the American people who have embraced an ethical, hardworking, customer focused business and made us the company we are. We intend to offer all our products at even more affordable prices, ensuring that when the FDA does shut us down, as many people as possible will have benefitted from a product that Public Health England classifies as a minimum of 95% safer than traditional tobacco cigarettes.
"Hence this announcement today," said Fraser Cropper, Managing Director. "We have a duty to be honest with our customers and our staff. It is currently impossible to see any way through the impasse the FDA is imposing on businesses like ours across the USA. While we will continue to support our customers and provide employment for our staff for as long as we possibly can, Totally Wicked in the USA will close its doors in the Summer of 2018, not because we want to, because the USA government is demanding that we do. Mealy mouthed platitudes will continue to be used to justify its actions and castigate businesses like ours and criticize our unwillingness to comply with ‘citizen protecting’ legislation, while the truth is denied an open sharing. What will be left is again a tobacco monopoly, which holds its ‘trophy’ vaping products up as talismans of change, while continuing to sell, endorsed and enforced by the USA government, smoking products that kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens every year. Corporate greed and craven political capitulation is the true story. This government and its federal bodies charged to defend and protect its citizens have failed the American smokers. While the majority of the rest of the world is moving towards an enlightened position on the transformational potential of consumer vaping products, the USA will retrench itself with a ‘year zero’ firestorm that is already alight in the USA and will consume all independent vape businesses like ours in Summer 2018. These are the facts.
"The FDA may want Americans to continue smoking; we do not."
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