Page 3 - Edge Issue 2 2019

Staff Editorial:
Trump’s Vape Flavor Ban
Early in September, President Trump announced that his administration was planning to ban flavored e-cigarettes in response to a vaping-related illness that, as of October 8, had sickened more than 1,000 people and killed at least 21.
While vaping flavors may not have directly impacted this wave of illness, this flavoring ban could potentially solve an expansive problem in the United States relating to the underage use of e-cigarettes. The trend of e-cigarette use in youth that proliferates today directly mirrors the cigarette phenomenon of the past century. The same precautions that were taken then to solve the cigarette health crisis are necessary again. The Trump Administration’s proposed legislature is integral to the cessation of the vaping epidemic that has impacted minors across the country.
Since 2011, there has been a surge in e-cigarette use in the United States. In fact, according to the 2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey, 1.5 million more students used e-cigarettes in 2018 than in 2017. That’s a 78% increase in underage e-cigarette use. There has also been a rise in the frequency and use of flavored e-cigarettes among high school students who are current e-cigarette users.
Many young people are convinced that vaping is not harmful to their health. While it is true that e-cigarettes contain fewer chemicals as compared with cigarettes, not enough is known about e-cigarette use to really warrant this flippant attitude towards health risks. This is the most important aspect of the argument against e-cigarettes: we don’t yet have enough information about their potential risks. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), however, e-cigarette use is never safe for youth or young adults. (For more information on the potential health risks of vapes, as well as vaping regulations in the state of Florida, see the September 2018 issue of The Edge.)
In the past few months, an illness known as “vape lung” has killed at least fifteen people and caused illness in more than a thousand. The CDC has warned consumers to avoid all vaping products. Health officials in the United States are unable to identify the cause of this illness because so little is known about e-cigarettes and their health detriments. It is difficult to determine the root of the problem because the disease could be caused by anything in vapes: the THC, the nicotine, the additives. More than 100 officials in the CDC are currently investigating the cause of these illnesses.
This wave of disease has caused the Trump Administration to propose the new legislation, which aims to prevent companies from targeting e-cigarette users who are under 18.
While e-cigarette companies deny they target under-18 customers, they tend to employ several different advertising methods that appeal to youth. JUUL, for example, has heavily funded advertising that focuses around social media. In 2015, the company spent more than a million dollars to market their e-cigarettes on the internet.
The most effective way to make your products appealing to young people, however, is to introduce different flavors. This method isn’t unique. Long before vaping companies did it, cigarette companies did it.
While electronic devices such as vapes and juuls have taken the spotlight at the forefront of tobacco use in the United States, cigarettes used to be just as pervasive. Smoking has had a place in America for centuries. Cigarette use continued to grow entering the 1900s, but in the 1920s the first medical reports linking smoking to lung cancer started to emerge. Smoking became less popular over time as knowledge of its health effects became readily available to the public.
However, a problem still remained. Cigarette companies were deliberately advertising towards youth in order to create “replacement smokers.” These replacement smokers would serve as a customer base as adults drifted away from the practice of smoking or died. Tobacco companies would market to youth in many ways, but most notably through the advent of flavors such as candy, spice, herb, cola, fruit, and coffee. These flavors encouraged under- 18s to begin a smoking habit because the initial bitter taste of the cigarette was removed. Back when the flavoring of cigarettes was legal, 20% of youth smokers in the U.S. reported using flavored tobacco products. Only 6% of adult smokers, meanwhile, had used the flavored products. The government recognized that something had to be done to counteract this youth smoking epidemic.
In 2009, with the “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act,” the FDA banned cigarettes in any flavor but menthol.
Immediately following this ban, the probability of middle and high school youth becoming smokers dropped by 17%. The number of cigarettes smoked by youth smokers dropped by 58%.
When young adults had no access to flavored tobacco products, a big part of their reason for smoking was eliminated. They were more open to listen to the scientific evidence that was being proposed concerning the health risks of cigarettes and other tobacco products.
If President Trump’s proposed legislation takes effect, this same reduction in youth smoking rates will occur again. But this time, it won’t be cigarettes that decrease in use. It will be vapes and juuls. This flavor ban is exactly what the country needs in order to counteract underage rates of e-cigarette use. We are living in an age where we lack information about the adverse health effects of vapes and juuls- just as smokers were in the 1900s when it came to cigarettes. While wading through the murky waters of this age of e-cigarette disinformation, effective legislation such as that which is currently being proposed by the Trump Administration is absolutely imperative.
This editorial represents the opinion of The Edge Staff