Backlash may send vapers back to cigarettes
Experts say that could cause a health crisis
WASHINGTON — Only two years ago, electronic cigarettes was a small industry with big potential to improve public health by steering millions of smokers away from deadly cigarettes.
That promise led U.S. regulators to take a hands-off approach to e-cigarette makers, including a Silicon Valley startup named Juul Labs, 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 as politicians scramble to address two 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 are poised to wipe out thousands of flavored vapes that have attracted teens. But experts fear the scattershot clampdown could drive adults who vape back to cigarette smoking, still 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 … ,” said Jonathan Foulds, addiction researcher and tobacco specialist at Penn State University.
Foulds and other experts continue to view e-cigarettes as a potential “offramp” for smokers, allowing them to continue using nicotine without inhaling all the toxic byproducts of burning tobacco.
But they warn the vaping backlash could harm the public perception of e-cigarettes, while ignoring the riskiest products 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 highinducing chemical found in marijuana. Investigators are focused on thickeners and additives found in illegal THC cartridges sold on the black market.