The PACT Act: What To Expect

A significant legal change is coming to our industry and it is all but guaranteed to affect the way you shop online with us and any other brand like ours. We believe in the importance of keeping you informed, so we’ve put this article together to sound the alarm.

The PACT Act

In 2009, Congress passed the Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking (“PACT”) Act into law in an effort to curb underage use of tobacco products like cigarettes and hookah shisha. This bill was an amendment of a previous piece of legislation, the Jenkins Act of 1949, which sought to prevent and crack down on illegal sales and tax dodging involving tobacco products. The PACT Act passed the same year the FDA seized authority over all tobacco products through the passage of the Tobacco Control Act and prohibited the United States Postal Service (USPS) from delivering cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products directly to consumers. 

This was years ahead of the surge in popularity of disposable vapes, but this trend wasn’t going to be able to dodge government scrutiny forever. With the passage of the most recent Covid-19 relief bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, an amendment to the PACT Act was signed into law. The Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act, which goes into effect March 28 of this year, modified the terminology used in previous legal code to rope in all Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (“ENDS”) with cigarettes, chew, shisha tobacco and hookahs. This legislation is intended to lock down the disposable vape market, effectively preventing its sales and efforts to distribute directly to end users, but applies to much more than the ever-popular nicotine disposables. This legislation was backed by the postal service, FedEx, UPS and the other mail carriers, who unanimously pledged to uphold and enforce the new bans.

ENDS

The Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act defines an ENDS as “any electronic device that, through an aerosolized solution, delivers nicotine, flavor, or any other substance to the user inhaling from the device,” including “an e-cigarette; an e-hookah; an e-cigar; a vape pen; an advanced refillable personal vaporizer; an electronic pipe; and any component, liquid, part, or accessory of a device described [above], without regard to whether the component, liquid, part, or accessory is sold separately from the device.”

The Resulting Changes

So what does that include? Much more than nicotine vapes like the infamous Puff Bars- under the new law, zero-nicotine liquids, synthetic nicotine, vape juices containing cannabinoids such as CBD and THC, and their delivery systems- such as vape cartridges, filled or empty, and pre-filled disposable vapes– will no longer be legally permitted for direct sales and shipment.

In other words, we will no longer be able to ship Silver Owl Full Spectrum Cartridges, Full Spectrum Lite Cartridges, Delta 8 Cartridges and Delta 8 Disposables to you and will have to pull these from our online CBD store. We may have to pull Silver Owl CBD Crystals, CBG Crystals, CBD/CBG Crystals and Delta 8 Dabs from the website too, but we’re not fully sure about that quite yet. We’ll update this blog when we have an answer.

Though these changes will prevent us from shipping packages containing the aforementioned items directly to your door, it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to get them- it just means you won’t be able to get them straight from our headquarters.

What We Can and Will Do

The modified PACT Act will restrict direct-to-consumer shipments of ENDS and related products, significantly change the taxation and reporting requirements for these, and prevent us from continuing to sell them on our website when March 28, 2021 comes around. We won’t be able to ship the prohibited items to end users via USPS, FedEx, UPS or anyone else, but we’ll still be able to ship boxes out to verified businesses and pallets out to their distributors.

So while you won’t be able to get ENDS such as our Cartridges and Disposables from us, you will still be able to get them from your neighborhood shops. We’ve been supporting our partners in retail and encouraging our users to shop with small, local businesses in their area since we started Silver Owl, but in a few weeks there won’t be any viable alternatives available. If you want to buy our Full Spectrum and Full Spectrum Lite Cartridges, Delta 8 Cartridges and Disposables, and possibly our CBD/CBG/combo Crystals and Delta 8 Dabs (though the jury’s still out on these), you’ll have to get them from a local supplier in your area.

If the products you know and love are not yet available in your area, tell the managers and owners of your favorite shops to check us out and consider stocking our lines. Let them know that you’d continue buying these if you had the ability to do so. If you have one of our ENDS and/or its packaging laying around, show these to the teams in those businesses. If they’re stocking Silver Owl on their shelves, or if they start carrying us, your supply won’t have to completely disappear.

If you have a strong opinion about the modified PACT Act, we would encourage you to voice it with your elected officials in your state’s capitol and its Congress, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Please understand that this is completely out of our hands; and though we’d gladly continue offering our ENDS products to you directly if we could, this will simply be out of the question by the end of March 2021. You can also send an email to the USPS by following the instructions found HERE.

If our products have helped, we hope we’ll be able to continue assisting you in any way we can. The new requirements might shake up your access to them in the short term, but this disruption doesn’t have to be a permanent problem. Please consider letting your local shops know about us so we can continue meeting your needs. We’ll be grateful that you did- as will your mind, body and spirit!