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A Lyft driver picked up a passenger at 3am in Maricopa Arizona last week, and began what should have been a nine mile trip to her home. She had been drinking at a bar and was picked up from a friend’s home.

San Francisco, California voted to ban the sale of vape devices, unless those vape devices were first submitted to the FDA and approved under the FDA’s Premarket Approval (PMA). This ban applies not just to local retailers but also online retailers, who are barred from shipping purchased product to San Francisco customers. The ban on nicotine vaporizers is the first of its kind in the nation.

Monsanto parent company Bayer announced plans to spend $5.6 billion designing new weed killers without glyphosate. Their popular Roundup products contain glyphosate and have been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). The company announced a $500 million per year research budget over the next decade.

A report at the February 2019 American Stroke Association meeting identified additional risks from vaping. Using federal research data from the Center for Disease Control’s 2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Systems (BRFSS), researchers compared the rate of serious medical events of vapers vs non-smokers.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics used an age-predication algorithm and found that half of JUULs social followers on the site Twitter were underage and could not legally purchase or use the product.

Attorney Mahzad Kazempour Hite was featured during an ABC 7 I-team investigates story on vape explosions.

March 27, 2019: Monsanto and their new parent company Bayer were hit with an $80 million verdict today, after being found responsible for causing non-hodgkins lymphoma in a man who used Roundup.

Edwin Hardeman of Santa Rosa sued Monsanto for causing his lymphoma cancer, the first person to do so in federal court. A jury in San Francisco has found Monsanto liable for causing Edwin’s cancer. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) is a cancer primarily affecting the immune system. The jury is currently working to decide damages.

March 13, 2019: The FDA announced premarket approval requirements for all flavored e-cigarette products, with a deadline to file by August 8, 2021. This new deadline is one year earlier than previously proposed. No flavored tobacco products will be allowed on the market if they have not submitted applications to the FDA after this date. The FDA has stated they believe this will cause some flavored tobacco products to no longer be on the market.

The CDC has a new report on tobacco use among minors, and they are sounding the alarm over the results. After years of progress to reduce the amount of teens consuming tobacco, tobacco use rose dramatically in 2018. Vaping in particular exploded upward, 4.9 million high school students now use tobacco products.