Today, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially announced plans to limit the sale of sweet-flavored e-cigarette products in places where people under the age of 18 can freely shop. The agency will also take aim at flavored cigars and menthol-flavored cigarettes in an effort to keep kids from getting hooked on any products that contain nicotine.
This isn’t a complete ban on flavored e-cigarette products, and it’s weaker than the proposal that was teased last week before the FDA officially announced it. Pods in traditional tobacco flavors, as well as mint and menthol, can stay on the shelves of convenience stores and gas stations. Stores can sell flavored products only if they don’t let in underage consumers, or if the products are placed in an age-restricted section where kids can’t see them, much less buy the merchandise. E-cigarette manufacturers can continue to sell their fruity- and dessert-flavored cartridges online, provided they have adequate age verification measures in place.
The move is an effort to curb what FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb has been calling an epidemic of vaping. Today, the FDA revealed why: 3.6 million high school and middle school students are using e-cigarettes, according to long-awaited results from the National Youth Tobacco Survey that the FDA released today. “That’s 1.5 million more students using these products than the previous year,” Gottlieb says in a statement. For high school students, that’s a 78 percent spike compared to last year. For middle school students, it’s a 48 percent increase. The majority of these students report that they vape flavored products.
That draw of flavored products isn’t new; it’s been shown by studies that found flavor preferences drive vaping more for adolescents than for adults. “It’s the exact reason that flavored cigarettes were banned. We’re not reinventing anything here, we’ve already lived this,” says Meghan Morean, a psychology professor at Oberlin College who has studied the appeal of flavors. And a massive report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine suggests that kids who start vaping are more likely to try cigarettes than their peers.
This new data that shows skyrocketing vaping in high schools and middle schools has ignited a push for more regulation. “These increases must stop,” Gottlieb says. “I will not allow a generation of children to become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarettes.”
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