Clampdown on vaping could send users back to cigarettes
WASHINGTON — Only two years ago, electronic cigarettes were viewed as a small industry with big potential to improve public health by offering a path to steer millions of smokers away from deadly cigarettes.
That promise led U.S. regulators to take a handsoff approach to e-cigarette makers, including a Silicon Valley startup named Juul Labs, which was being praised for creating “the iPhone of e-cigarettes.”
Today, Juul and hundreds of smaller companies are at the center of a political backlash that threatens to sweep e-cigarettes from store shelves nationwide as politicians scramble to address two separate public health crises tied to vaping: underage use among teenagers and a mysterious and sometimes fatal lung ailment that has affected more than 1,000 people.
New restrictions at the local, state and federal level are poised to wipe out thousands of fruit-, candyand dessert-flavored vapes that have attracted teens. But experts who study tobacco policy fear the scattershot approach of the clampdown could have damaging, unintended consequences, including driving adults who vape back to cigarette smoking, which remains the nation’s leading preventable cause of death.
“This could take us from potentially the single biggest improvement in public health in the United States toward a public health disaster in which cigarettes continue to be the dominant nicotine product,” said Jonathan Foulds, an addiction researcher and tobacco specialist at Penn State University.
Foulds and many other experts continue to view e-cigarettes as a potential
“off-ramp” for smokers, allowing them to continue using nicotine — the addictive chemical in cigarettes — without inhaling all the toxic byproducts of burning tobacco.
But they warn the vaping backlash could do irreparable harm to the public perception of e-cigarettes, while ignoring the riskiest products that are most likely to blame for the recent outbreak.
Federal investigators say that nearly 80% of people who have come down with the vaping illness reported using products containing THC, the high-inducing chemical found in marijuana. They have not traced the problem to any single product or ingredient. But investigators are increasingly focused on thickeners and additives found in illegal THC cartridges sold on the black market.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration specifically warned the public not to vape THC or purchase any vaping products off the street.
THC vapes are separate
from the legal, nicotine-filled e-cigarettes being targeted by President Donald Trump and politicians across the country.
Democratic governors in New York, Michigan, Washington, Rhode Island and Oregon have followed the president’s plan to ban flavored e-cigarettes nationally with their own state-level flavor restrictions. Massachusetts’ Republican governor has gone even further, placing a four-month moratorium on sales of vaping products of any kind.
“The problem here is we have convinced adult America that vaping is as dangerous as smoking — and nothing could be further from the truth,” said Kenneth Warner, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan’s school of public health.
E-cigarettes generally heat a flavored nicotine solution into an inhalable aerosol. There is little research on the longterm effects of inhaling the chemicals in vaping, such as vegetable glycerin.
Despite those unknowns, most experts agree e-cigarettes pose a much smaller risk than cigarettes, which cause cancer, lung disease and stroke and account for some 480,000 U.S. deaths each year.
Even before the current uproar over vaping, most adults considered e-cigarettes dangerous. A 2017 government survey found 55% of Americans considered e-cigarettes as harmful as regular cigarettes.
And while the flavor bans are likely to curb teen vaping, Warner and others point out that those policies won’t prohibit flavors in traditional tobacco products. That means both teens and adults could wind up switching to deadlier menthol cigarettes or flavored cigars, which come in coffee, raspberry, chocolate and hundreds of other varieties.