Warning to vape importers, manufacturers over nicotine level confusion

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Authorities have requested importers and manufacturers of vape products to review the nicotine concentrations, with the potential for products to be withdrawn if they exceeded limits.

This comes as TVNZ's Fair Go reported the Ministry of Health may have been given false or misleading information about the amount of nicotine in some products.

The Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act required products to be accurately labelled with the concentration of nicotine in mg/mL.

The Ministry of Health said all vaping products sold in New Zealand must be notified to the health ministry through a national database, the Health Advisory and Regulatory Platform (HARP).

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Vaping products could not exceed 20mg/mL for freebase nicotine or 50mg/mL for nicotine salt products. It wasn't possible to notify products through HARP that exceeded those limits.

Manufacturers or importers of vaping products could face a $400,000 fine for breaching nicotine level regulations.

The director general of health was also able to order a recall of products if they posed an unacceptable health risk.

The Ministry of Health was looking at a number of steps to enhance the monitoring of compliance with regulations, including requiring manufacturers and importers to review their notifications to HARP.

"If any notifiers that find that their products exceed the nicotine salt limit, we will instruct them to withdraw their product notification and cease selling those products immediately, including communicating these actions to any distributors and retailers that may be stocking their products."