|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
With a lawsuit underway against Livermore-based Apollo E-cigs, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s office recently announced that the court granted a preliminary injunction extending a temporary restraining order that bars the company from selling flavored tobacco products or synthetic cannabis products locally and online.
The lawsuit filed by Price’s office in September alleges that the business sold banned flavored tobacco products — predominantly vapes and vape juice — to people under the age of 21.
“We are pleased that the Superior Court recognized the gravity of this situation, in particular the danger that Apollo E-Cigs’ unlawful actions pose to the children of Alameda County and the State of California,” Price said in a statement.
“The Court has now confirmed the merit of our lawsuit, shutting down a major bad actor that we believe may have been manufacturing and selling as many as tens of thousands of banned flavored vapes each month,” she added.
According to court documents obtained by the Weekly, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Julia Spain rejected the company’s argument that the ban solely applies to “tobacco retailers” conducting in-person sales at retail locations based on the legal definition of the term.
In her order, Spain noted that nothing in the legal definitions requires the retailer and the consumer to be dealing with each other face-to-face at the retailer’s physical retail premise for the law to be applicable.
“The statutory definition of ‘tobacco retailer’ merely means that the retailer is dealing ‘in any manner or by any means whatever’ with an ‘ultimate consumer’ who will use the product, as opposed to a wholesaler who will resell the product to someone else,” the judge wrote.
“In other words, it is clear that the definition of ‘tobacco retailer’ is clearly limited to retail sales to retail customers, and does not include wholesale sales. But the definition of ‘tobacco retailer’ is not limited to sales at Defendants’ physical retail locations,” she added.
At the time of publication, Apollo E-cigs had not responded to a request for comment.
The initial lawsuit and subsequent temporary restraining order came after a multi-agency investigation that included the Livermore Police Department, California’s Department of Public Health and California’s Department of Tax and Fee Administration.
The authorities were alerted by the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District when school administrators began to notice that products purchased from Apollo were showing up on multiple school campuses.
“This is a game of whack-a-mole, and we have to shut down these companies if they keep breaking our laws,” LVJUSD Trustee Kristie Wang said in a statement.
Wang is also a co-founder of Flavors Addict Kids-Livermore, which advocated for the 2019 passage of the city’s restrictions on the sale of flavored tobacco products and e-cigarettes.
“We have passed laws to keep these addictive products out of our communities, but bad actor companies continue to sell to our youth. As a mom and school board member, I have seen first-hand the harms caused by flavored tobacco products and electronic vape devices,” Wang said.
As a result of the preliminary injunction, Apollo’s operations are to remain suspended for the duration of the litigation. According to the court website, the trial date is set for Aug. 2, 2024.