Massachusetts banned all vaping products last month in a knee-jerk response to a small number of health issues and fatalities related to vaping. Small business owners caught off guard, as well as vape companies, challenged the ban in court.
Related: Mass Gov. Announces State-Wide Vaping Ban
A judge ruled the ban could stay but not in total and not without hearings and public comment.
Ruling on a request from vape companies to lift the ban while legal battles over the rule play out, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Douglas H. Wilkins ordered that nicotine vape sales in Massachusetts must be allowed to resume next Monday — unless the Baker administration submits the ban for consideration as a formal emergency regulation.
Wilkins’s order also leaves in place for now Baker’s ban on marijuana vaping products, saying evidence collected by federal health officials suggests those products are more likely the culprit behind thousands of lung illnesses and 33 deaths around the country.
It must be nice to be a judge. You get to pick and choose which otherwise legal products can remain banned despite the failure of the state, according to the court, to follow proper procedure in prohibiting them.
Be that as it may, Massachusetts, which insists it has followed the rules, has a week to follow them as directed by judge Wilkins or nicotine vape can be sold starting Monday, October 28th.
I’m not expecting the state to drop the ball. Progressives have had an irrational hatred of the product and the technology for some time. Nor would I expect the four-month ban to be the end of it.
The government rarely gives back what it takes and only then on its terms. And that is great news for New Hampshire.
