A for rent sign hangs in the front window of Cloud99 Vapes at 50 Second Ave. between Second Street and Third Street. The shop will be closing in the months ahead, a victim of the public health crisis involving vaping products.
According to
published reports, vaping-related injuries and deaths are continuing to mount, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting 1,080 lung injuries in 48 states and the Virgin Islands and more than 20 confirmed deaths from 15 states. (A Bronx teenager was the first person to die of a vaping-related illness in New York,
officials said Tuesday.)
On Sept. 17, New York passed an emergency ban on flavored vaping products. However, the ban
was halted on Oct. 3, when an appeals court issued a temporary restraining order. The next hearing is set for Oct. 18.
Still, the damage has been done. As
MSN recently reported, business at Cloud99 is down 70 percent.
Pete Foran, a co-owner, is a retired NYPC officer. Per MSN:
Electronic cigarettes had become a galloping trend, and a vape store seemed like a lucrative second act.
Sure enough: Offering dozens of flavored vaping products, the Second Avenue shop was a hit. Foran and his partners opened two more locations in Nanuet and Suffern. Revenue hit $2 million.
And now...
Foran and his partners are stuck with $300,000 of inventory, 95 percent of which is flavored. The manufacturers won't take the product back, and Foran isn't even sure how to dispose of highly concentrated nicotine, each bottle of "vape juice" the equivalent of packs if not cartons of cigarettes. "You can't just throw it in a landfill," he said. "It's poison."
In Foran's view, officials didn't approach the outbreak rationally. "They should have handled it like a homicide investigation," tracing the potentially illness-causing cartridges to their sources, he said. "What's coming out is that it's black-market products that are causing these things."
NBC News did conduct an investigation late last month:
NBC News commissioned one of the nation's leading cannabis testing facilities to test a sampling of THC cartridges — 18 in all — obtained from legal dispensaries and unlicensed dealers.
The findings were deeply troubling.
Of the three purchased from legal dispensaries in California, the CannaSafe testing company found no heavy metals, pesticides or residual solvents like Vitamin E.
But 13 out of the other 15 samples from black market THC cartridges were found to contain Vitamin E.
CannaSafe also tested 10 of the unregulated cartridges for pesticides. All 10 tested positive.
Still,
a new poll conducted by Siena College finds 61 percent of New Yorkers support the ban, and 78 percent believe that vaping is a serious public health problem.
Cloud99 Vapes opened in 2015 (at the site of the former
Yoo's Convenience Store). And it won't be the only local vape-related shop impacted by the current crisis.
