WASHINGTON -- Three cigar associations are hoping that a federal judge will stave off an Aug. 10 deadline on warning-label mandates for cigar packaging, filing an appeal to a federal court decision that recently upheld the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s original decision to require the labels, according to NATO, a tobacco-retailing association.
On June 8, the three Washington, D.C.-based groups—the Cigar Association of America, the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association and Cigar Rights of America—filed a motion with a federal court seeking an injunction against enforcement of the FDA’s new cigar and pipe tobacco warning statements or a postponement of the Aug. 10, 2018, effective date for these new warning statements, according to Lakeville, Minn.-based NATO.
The groups requested an enforcement delay of 60 days after the federal court ruled on the fifth count of the original lawsuit. In that count, the cigar groups challenged the FDA’s inclusion of premium cigars in the agency’s deeming regulations and its failure to consider an option exempting premium cigars from regulation. In the motion, the associations rely in part on the statement issued from Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia that urged the FDA not to proceed with implementing the new warnings.
Specifically, the judge wrote in his decision that “requiring the premium cigar industry to incur substantial compliance costs while the agency comprehensively reassesses the wisdom of regulation, before the warnings requirements go into effect, smacks of basic unfairness. In the court’s view, the prudent course would be for FDA to stay the warnings requirement as to premium cigars.”
In addition to seeking an injunction against or postponement of the effective date for the new cigar and pipe tobacco health-warning statements, the motion states that the cigar associations will appeal the federal district court ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, NATO said.
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