California AB 762 clears both chambers: two dates, one definition, no signature yet
The bill would end the battery-embedded single-use device in California, but manufacturing and retail stop twelve months apart — and the definition is drawn wide enough that a sealed body with a charging port is still a disposable.
The wire version is one sentence: California is banning disposable vapes. The bill text answers what that leaves out: what counts as a disposable, which date applies to whom, whether it is law yet.
Not yet, on the last one. AB 762, by Assemblymember Irwin, passed the Senate on 25 August and the Assembly concurred the next day, 47-16. The legislature’s status page records “To Engrossing and Enrolling” as the latest action — passed, not signed. As of this writing the Governor’s August signing announcements do not include it, but a signature or a veto can land on any morning.
Two dates, twelve months apart
The bill text sets the upstream date first: from 1 January 2027 no person may import or manufacture for sale in the state a new or refurbished disposable, battery-embedded vapor inhalation device. Retail follows on 1 January 2028: no selling, distributing or offering for sale of a new or refurbished device. For a year, stock already here stays sellable while nothing new enters: importers face 2027, shopkeepers 2028.
The definition is the part to read twice
The statute covers a vaporization device that contains a tobacco product, but not cannabis or a cannabis product, and “that is not designed or intended to be reused.” FDA-regulated medical devices are out too — class II and III outright, class I in health care use. The definition then extends to any device meeting “either, or both” of two tests: not refillable, not rechargeable.
Either. So a sealed body with a USB-C port is caught by the first limb, which reaches any device without a replaceable pod or a refillable tank. A third sub-clause counts a device as refillable if its coil is not user-replaceable — backwards, and apparently a drafting slip. Only a device that is both refillable and rechargeable sits outside: the compromise we assessed as the category’s own answer to the disposal problem, and the only version of the format left standing.
Where the penalties sit
In two places, though not the two the structure suggests. Both prohibitions sit in the new Public Resources Code chapter, section 42260, and carry the same ladder: civil liability of $500, $1,000 and $2,000 for first, second and third-or-later violations, plus an infraction fine of up to $500.
Business and Professions Code section 22974.2 adds seizure from 1 January 2028: $50 per individual device seized, not per package, plus licence suspension on a second seizure and revocation on a third. The prohibition turns on format, not flavour, but that seizure section is the flavoured-tobacco one, listing these devices beside flavoured products banned by a separate, older statute.
Neither date changes what is inside the device. These are nicotine products, nicotine is addictive, and whichever calendar a retailer works to, the buyer has to be old enough: 21 across the United States, 18 in most markets outside it.