Pa. A.G. joins push back against vaping industry

From the Marlboro Man to the Tareyton smokers who would rather fight than switch to reaching for a Lucky Strike, cigarette makers played on star quality to attract people to smoking in the 1960s to 1980s. Ads and TV commercials portrayed smoking as a glamorous part of adulthood, enticing young people to embrace the addictive health risk of nicotine.

As cigarettes go, we’ve “come a long way, baby” to mandatory health warnings and acknowledgement that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other serious diseases.

Progress? On the cigarette front, perhaps, but a new unhealthy product has come to town, and this time, the inducements are being advertised on social media and websites to target youth. “Vaping and ecigarettes have come on to the scene out of nowhere, but their impact … is profound,” said state Attorney General Josh Shapiro last week in a presentation at Radnor High School.

Shapiro was in Delaware County to announce a lawsuit filed against the vaping industry’s largest manufacturer JUUL Labs to force the company to stop selling products in Pennsylvania, alleging unfair trade practices and deceptive marketing to youth.

Shapiro said he was announcing the suit filed in Philadelphia County Court at a high school because of the rapid rise in vaping among youth. He said that youth smoking and nicotine use had fallen to record lows seven years ago in Pennsylvania but in the past three years, the use of vaping products by high school students has tripled.

Shapiro’s action is not the first by law enforcement against vaping. In November, 2019, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele filed a similar suit, followed by Bucks County District Atttorney Matt Weintraub in January. Pennridge School District has joined other Bucks districts suing the vaping industry.

The lawsuits ask the courts to prohibit JUUL from selling its products in their jurisdictions and stop what the suits call deceptive marketing practices in digital advertising and store displays.

“Through the use of new technologies and deceptive and predatory marketing to children via social media, Juul has turned a generation into addicts unwittingly. Ecigarettes are responsible for the largest increase in teen substance abuse in decades,” Weintraub said at a January press conference announcing the Bucks suit.

In a statewide survey, 25 percent of high school students said they had vaped, compared to more than 37 percent in Bucks County, Weintraub said. Statistics are similar in Montgomery County, Steele said in November, citing a third of county youth say they vape regularly.

San Francisco-based JUUL issued a statement in response to Shapiro’s action last week, saying that the company is committed to marketing to adult smokers and is not trying to attract underage users. The company has stopped the sale of flavored pods and suspended advertising, according to the statement.

The health risks of vaping are becoming more widely known as the Centers for Disease Control monitors e-cigarette, or vaping associated lung injury (EVALI) cases. According

to CDC, there have been 2,758 hospitalized cases of the lung disease linked to vaping and 64 confirmed deaths.

The concerns are not without precedent. Warnings about lung cancer were already prevalent in the 1990s when Joe Camel was a familiar caricature promoting Camel brand cigarettes. While Camels maker R.J. Reynolds insisted the ads were not targeted at minors, the American Medical Association released a study in 1991 showing that by age 6 children knew that Joe Camel was associated with cigarettes just as readily as they knew Mickey Mouse was Disney.

In 1991, Janet Mangini, a San Francisco-based attorney, brought a suit against R. J. Reynolds, challenging the company for targeting minors with its “Joe Camel” advertising campaign. Court documents in that case showed R.J. Reynolds intentionally marketed to youth as the cigarette market for the future. The company settled out of court and voluntarily pulled Joe Camel as advertising in 1997.

Here we are, more than 20 years later fighting a similar battle on a new front. Shapiro, Weintraub, Steele and the Pennridge School District are on the right track. Manufacturers of harmful products cannot be allowed to prey on the desire of young people to be grown-up and cool.

Vaping, like cigarettes, can kill: That’s the message we need teens to understand.

“Through the use of new technologies and deceptive and predatory marketing to children via social media, Juul has turned a generation into addicts unwittingly. E-cigarettes are responsible for the largest increase in teen substance abuse in decades.” — Bucks County District Atttorney Matt Weintraub