Protect kids, ban disposable e-cigs
Over the past few years, lawmakers have introduced and debated laws designed to stop children from vaping, including bans on flavored products that many say appeal to young people. The FDA is weighing a nationwide ban on flavored tobacco. More recently, Gov. Hochul announced her plan to ban flavored tobacco statewide. The City Council is considering a similar measure.
These proposals won’t achieve their desired goal. Our laws already protect young people and prohibit underage sale. Failed enforcement is the problem. If our representatives want to take an important step to protect our children from flavored e-cigarettes, there’s one gaping hole in the FDA regulation that they can help close today. Stop the sale of disposable e-cigarettes.
After the crackdown on teen vaping took many products off the shelves, disposable e-cigarettes have become the most popular choice among teens. In 2020, the FDA issued guidance banning flavored, cartridge-based e-cigarettes. Unfortunately, the guidance let a whole category of flavored vapes slip through the cracks. Today they are still for sale, at reasonable prices, making it that much easier for lemonade, cotton candy, and cherry ice vapes to land in the hands of underage people.
Keeping tobacco products out of the hands of children is absolutely essential, but we have to make sure we get the enforcement right before we start introducing new laws that could create more harm than good. We banned flavored vapes nationwide, but the FDA enforcement loophole enabled opportunistic manufacturers of disposable e-cigarettes and now even synthetic tobacco to escape regulation.
Worse, these aggressive bans and tobacco prohibition just push sales out of stores and onto the street corner. At least in the stores, shopkeepers are monitored to sell regulated products and check IDs, or else they risk prosecution. On the streets, criminals, gangs, and organized crime sell sketchy products to children without problem. Some of these products are cheap counterfeits produced overseas with dangerous chemicals and laced with drugs.
The rush to create and pass new restrictive laws and bans before we get the existing laws enforced correctly is a bad formula. Prohibitions on flavored tobacco don’t stop consumers. Criminalizing menthols that are preferred by African-Americans may lead to unintended consequences that unfavorably affect Black communities. How will the new ban be enforced so that it won’t create more pretense for police to stop and frisk and provoke violence?
It’s also important to keep in mind that we should show empathy for the 30 million smokers in the United States who are struggling to quit. Some e-cigarettes could help them move off more harmful cigarettes to less risky alternatives, and ultimately quit altogether. Banning products to prevent sales to children that are already illegal doesn’t make much sense, especially if we are doing that at the expense of helping adults quit their cigarette addiction.
In his State of the Union address, President Biden reiterated the importance of his administration’s “Cancer Moonshot,” and emphasized the importance of evidence-based harm reduction strategies to support those suffering from addiction. Over the past several years, the administration has been rightly focused on addressing the opioid epidemic and fentanyl abuse. The administration’s efforts to expand treatment for substance abuse disorder, increase distribution of naloxone, fund national campaigns to educate young people about opioid abuse, and work closely with health care providers on prescribing guidelines all show an enlightened commitment to harm reduction.
Yet, despite this rhetoric, government policies still ignore the opportunity to help more than 30 million American smokers transition to less harmful options. Instead of smart, progressive strategies, policies more often seek to ban all flavored tobacco products and overlook the impact of a sensible harm reduction approach. Research has shown that some new nicotine products are more effective than the old gums and patches in helping smokers quit cigarettes. If the Biden administration is serious about its cancer moonshot and committed to evidence-based methods, then it should pursue tobacco harm reduction instead of prohibition.
There’s no easy answer here, but the old ways of prohibition are a failed strategy. We need to adopt innovative evidence-based approaches to tobacco harm reduction, and we need to be consistent and comprehensive in our enforcement strategies if we hope for any policy to work. Fortunately, closing the loophole on disposable e-cigarettes is something we can all support. Take the easy step to protect our children and tell the FDA to stop the sale of disposable vapor products today.