In Britain, a 10ml bottle of vape juice costs about two pounds or, at the time of writing, around three bucks. Sometimes less. There are shops selling perfectly decent e-liquid for a pound a bottle, and nobody over there considers this particularly remarkable. It is simply what things cost when a functioning market is allowed to function.

In America, the same ingredients in roughly the same bottle will set you back anywhere from ten to thirty dollars. The liquid, however, is not three times better. It does not contain high-performance nicotine sourced from high-performance tobacco plants. It is the same propylene glycol, the same vegetable glycerine, the same flavoring, and the same nicotine. 

The price difference exists because the United States government has decided that quitting smoking should be expensive, and the market has obliged, and it is, quite frankly, completely absurd, grossly unfair, and counterproductive. If you wanted to design a system that gently nudges ex-smokers back to cancer sticks – otherwise known as cigarettes – you could hardly devise a better system. 

The Paperwork Tax

The reason American vape juice costs so much has nothing to do with ingredients and everything to do with tiresome, predictable bureaucracy. To legally sell an e-liquid in the United States, a manufacturer must submit something called a Premarket Tobacco Product Application to the FDA. The cost of preparing this application ranges from $28,000 to $2.5 million. Per product. Per flavor. Per nicotine strength.

Let that sink in for a moment. 

If a small company wants to sell strawberry e-liquid in three nicotine strengths, they need three applications. If they also want to sell blueberry, that is three more. A modest product line of twenty flavors across three strengths would require sixty applications, potentially costing anywhere from $1.7 million to $150 million in compliance paperwork alone,  with no guarantee of approval.

The FDA received 26.6 million applications before approving 34 products, for an almost laughable success rate of 0.001 percent. For retailers and manufacturers rolling the dice on a new e-liquid, the odds are shockingly bad. At least in Vegas, you get a free drink while you lose your money.

Who Benefits?

The PMTA system was ostensibly designed to protect public health. In practice, it has achieved something rather different: it has made the American vape market safe for large corporations and hostile to everyone else.

A company with a $100 million compliance budget can navigate the process, while a small manufacturer operating out of a warehouse in Ohio cannot. The former stays in business, the latter closes, or sells illegal products, or simply never exists in the first place. The consumer is left with fewer choices at higher prices, which is generally not what protecting public health is supposed to look like, is it?

Meanwhile, cigarettes – the products that actually kill people in staggering numbers – remain widely available at every gas station in America. No million-dollar applications are required. The regulatory burden falls entirely on the products trying to help people quit, while the products doing the killing sail through unimpeded. 

One begins to wonder whose health is actually being protected here.

The British Comparison

Now, the UK also regulates vape juice. There are rules about nicotine strength, bottle size, and labeling. Manufacturers must notify the relevant authority and meet safety standards. It is certainly not a free-for-all.

What Britain does not do is require millions of dollars in compliance costs per product. It does not treat every new flavor as a potential national emergency requiring years of review. It does not create a regulatory environment so hostile that only tobacco companies can afford to participate.

The result is a competitive market with hundreds of manufacturers, thousands of products, and prices that reflect actual production costs rather than bureaucratic extraction. British vapers pay less, have more choices, and, rather inconveniently, quit smoking at far higher rates than Americans do.

In fact, the UK now has more vapers than smokers, all while America has a Supreme Court case about whether strawberry-flavored vape liquid is too dangerous to be legal. One of these countries is getting something right, at least.

The Real Cost

The price on the bottle is not the real cost. The real cost is measured in the smokers who looked at vaping, saw the prices, did the math, and decided to keep buying cigarettes instead. It is measured in the small businesses that closed, the products that were never developed, and the innovation that was strangled in its crib by a regulatory system designed to prevent exactly the kind of market disruption that saves lives.

Four hundred and eighty thousand Americans die from cigarettes every year. In light of that, the FDA has approved 34 vape products. The math is not complicated, but, for reasons unknown, the policy is.

Again, to remind you, Britain sells vape juice for a pound. America charges thirty dollars under the guise of consumer protection. Somewhere in between those two numbers is a very real body count that nobody in Washington seems particularly interested in discussing.

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