Youth vaping is down thanks to public education campaigns, social pressure, and increased knowledge of the dangers of smoking and addiction. Despite these promising developments, regulators are still pushing aggressive regulations and using approval processes that restrict adults’ access to a potentially lifesaving alternative to smoking.
Concerns over teen vaping can be partially attributed to the dramatic increase in use from 2012 to 2022. However, data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) shows that the rise in youth vaping from 2012 to 2022 overlaps youth smoking rates falling precipitously. After an initial popularity increase that largely replaced teen cigarettes use, rates of youth vaping have been falling since 2020. Taken as a whole, this data shows that nicotine use at all ages, even accounting for previous increases in vaping, has been falling for years.
Youth vaping is a frequent reason cited for harsh restrictions on the sale of flavored vapes to adults. Critics often claim that these products are marketed to kids. However, as noted youth vaping, and nicotine use in general, continues to fall.
While the increase in vaping options and flavors is not increasing youth vaping, it is helping adults quit smoking. Studies have shown that vaping, and flavors in particular, are an effective means of transitioning smokers to a less harmful product. Evidence shows that vaping is only five percent as harmful as smoking, significantly reducing the risk and future health care costs to users, and the cost to public healthcare systems such as Medicare and Medicaid.
Massachusetts tried to ban flavored vapes and cigarettes in 2019, leading to black markets and sales across the border into other states. This drove down the state’s tax revenue at the same time as it had to pay for more, unnecessary, enforcement.
In Kentucky House Bill 11 limits smokers’ choices in vaping products to only those the FDA has approved. Bills like this accomplish two things. First, it acts as a back door ban on almost all flavored smokeless products since the FDA has only approved tobacco and menthol flavored vapes. Second, it gives a large amount of market power to the handful of companies that have received approval. While regulatory fairness is imperative to a market economy, to improve competition and consumers’ options, the focus should be on reforming the FDA approval process so that all companies have a fair shot at approval.
As of March 2024, the FDA has only granted orders 23 vaping products and 34 total harm reduction products. Meanwhile it has rejected over one million applications. The only times the FDA granted a marketing order for a vaping product was in 2021 and 2022 and was for the products of exclusively three companies.
Thankfully, the FDA has been ordered to reconsider its “arbitrary and capricious” decisions for at least two more manufacturers. This would nearly double the number of competitors in the market to help smokers quit; however, it is not nearly enough. Transitioning smokers off cigarettes to vaping products has the potential to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.
The slow approval of vapes, and non-approval of flavored vaping products, is done in the name of preventing kids from vaping. Despite the claims, as flavors have become more available youth vaping and nicotine use continues to fall. In each case when flavor restrictions are put in place it has instead limited smokers’ options to quit or created more dangerous unregulated black markets. Draconian restrictions on adult use of a tool that helps smokers quit will cost lives without helping to keep kids away from nicotine.
