The Supreme Court on Wednesday handed a win to the Food and Drug Administration over its refusal to approve flavored e-cigarettes.
The court threw out an appeals court ruling that found the agency unlawfully changed the rules in the middle of proceedings when it was deciding whether to approve various products.
With e-cigarettes, or vapes, more popular than ever, the case put the FDA’s role in the approval process under scrutiny. Despite the agency’s refusal to approve many products, flavored vapes have remained widely available.
Writing for a unanimous court, conservative Justice Samuel Alito stopped short of ruling definitively that the FDA had acted unlawfully on one particular aspect of the case: whether the agency should have considered the companies’ marketing plans as part of the approval process.
That issue will now be decided by the lower court.
But Alito said that the FDA’s decisions were otherwise sound, noting that the companies’ own applications are “strong evidence that regulated entities had adequate notice of the sort of comparative analysis the FDA anticipated.”