By Joseph Levy, ASA Executive Director

ASA is staying ahead of attempts to over-regulate professional indoor tanning facilities at the state and federal level in 2024. And we’re working with our suppliers and the other associations worldwide to do so.

ASA has worked with suppliers since 2015 to work constructively with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration on the agency’s proposals to re-tool FDA proposed regulations for sunlamp products. FDA has delayed finalization of those proposed rules a dozen times since 2016. We’ve made it a priority to put our market in the best possible constructive position in addressing how these rule proposals are handled.

Our scientifically supported position on real-world sun care puts the fuel in the engine driving our success.

• ASA once again in 2024 worked to prevent legislative proposals to enact under-21 sunbed restrictions from moving forward anywhere in America.
• ASA once again in 2024 has successfully prevented under-18 sunbed restriction legislation from advancing in any state legislature – gaining bi-partisan support in many states for the scientifically supported position that sunburn prevention is not advanced by restricting access to professional sunbeds.
• ASA this year once again halted legislative talk to restrict spray tanning services to under-18 clients.
• ASA in 2024 convinced a state regulatory agency to abandon an effort to limit sunbed clients to 1-2 sessions per week.
• In many cases, ASA convinced would-be bill sponsors not to even introduce bills after seeing the science that does not support that approach. Some of our victories involved tax bills and other issues.

There are other accomplishments. And likely you haven’t heard about many of them. Aside from the 130+ legislative victories you have heard about, there are so many examples of potential issues ASA has prevented from ever even coming up.

When legislative proposals do get momentum, we’ve been a constructive force in preventing government over-reach when proposals wouldn’t actually improve public health.

My job has taken me to 43 state capitals, Washington D.C., most of Canada’s provinces in cooperation with the JCTA, and destinations worldwide in cooperation and support of the European Sunlight Association and the UK Sunbed Association.

In Ohio and Iowa this year, meetings with state legislators laid out bipartisan support for our position when bills were introduced to outlaw sunbed visits for clients under age 18. I visited Columbus five times this year to meet with more than two-dozen committee members personally. We prefer to do this before bills come before a committee for consideration.

And if a bill actually does move forward in a legislative committee, we’ve matured to the point of providing a positive, constructive case supporting our position. Such as we did in two different committees in the Ohio legislature this year.

The exact way we present our message changes based on circumstances, but the core science always shines through. We thought you’d like to see how it looks on paper.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.