PMTA: the application, not a verdict
A PMTA — Premarket Tobacco Product Application — is the filing a manufacturer submits to the FDA to legally market a product in the US. "Has a PMTA pending" means the paperwork is in and under review; it is not an FDA endorsement and says nothing about how a product performs. Authorisation is a marketing permission, full stop.
MDOs and 'removed from the market'
A Marketing Denial Order (MDO) is the FDA declining an application, which can pull a product from legal US sale. When you read that a device was "banned," it usually means an MDO — a regulatory decision about that filing, not a safety recall. The practical effect on you is availability: the thing may simply stop being orderable.
State and local flavour rules
Separately from the FDA, individual states and cities set their own rules — some restrict flavoured products, some limit where they can be sold. This is why availability differs by address, and why our checkout enforces where we can and can't ship. It changes often; the rule that applied last year may not be this year's.
What we can and can't tell you
We can report a rule — what a term means, that a product's status changed, where we're allowed to ship. We can't and won't tell you a product is safe, safer than smoking, or a way to quit; those are claims that require FDA authorisation no retailer can grant. If a headline implies otherwise, that's the spin to read past.