Washington state last year made $367 million off weed sales, almost 1% of their total budget. That's a hell of a lot of money. And all those issues with nervousness and banks goes away if you legalize it at the federal level, which is the what the OP wants.
The devil, as always, is in the details.
How is the sale & distribution of vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, and nicotine when, with the possible exception of nicotine which not all vapers use, are widely used in food flavorings, commercially baked goods, and much more? It would be like attempting to have the government control, track, and tax baking soda or table salt like tobacco products. Glycerine you know is used extremely widely and commonly, and have you ever picked up a bottle of food flavoring in the baking aisle of the store and read the ingredients?
This is one of the reasons vaping is so frowned upon by those in government. It's nearly impossible and quite impractical as well as unrealistic to control, regulate, and tax.
It's replacing tobacco sales which heavily impacts States, especially those part of the agreement whereby the State agreed not to pursue big tobacco legally in exchange they received a payment every year based on the tobacco sales numbers, and which they immediately turned around and borrowed tons of money against (hey, it's addicting, right?) counting on those tobacco payments *and* the State tobacco tax revenues. That's not even counting the huge economic interest big pharma has in keeping the quit-smoking pharma division rolling, and all the lung cancer specialists, the hospice industry, the list goes on.
There's huge money at stake here. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they wait till this recent storm blows over and try again from a different angle to somehow ban or at least heavily regulate it.
You might be thinking "good! regulate that shit!" but what that will do is hand the big tobacco companies a monopoly on vaping products like Juul, as the rest of the market is almost exclusively small businesses with only a few employees if any and won't be able to afford the overhead of the compliance costs. The government would be ecstatic over this as it means they only have a handful of large corporations who they're accomplices with anyway to tax, regulate, and police, therefor their tax revenue stream is secured so they won't be in danger of defaulting on paying back the money they borrowed counting on future tax receipts from people smoking tobacco, not vaping.
Quietly encouraging smoking by eliminating an effective alternative and tool to quit while passing ever more draconian anti-smoking laws also generates revenue from civil fines, legal fees, and another source of warm bodies for the private prison system and another person "in the system" for life, ripe for further abuse, intimidation, and revenue generation.
Strat