Illicit e-cigarettes flood stores as FDA struggles to combat imports
Juul was once the cool vape, blamed for hooking teenagers on e- cigarettes, and it is set to pay billions of dollars in legal settlements.
Then came Puff Bar, which was hot in high schools until federal officials began impounding those vapes. Elf Bar stepped in, and its products have been seized at the border. A parade of facsimiles is moving in right behind them: Virtue Bar, Juicy Bar, Lost Mary, Lost Vape and many more.
The latest flood of illicit e- cigarettes is arriving from China in Barbiecore colors and fruit, ice cream and slushy flavors, and accounts for a major share of the estimated $5.5 billion e- cigarette market in the United States.
The never-ending influx of vapes, some offering 5,000 or more puffs per device or escalating nicotine levels, has exposed a gaping lapse in enforcement by the Food and Drug Administration, which has authorized only a handful of the hundreds of options that line convenience store walls nationwide. Members of Congress, two dozen state attorneys general and even the Big Tobacco companies have stepped up their calls for the agency to get the situation under control.
Granted, the latest pleas by the tobacco industry are viewed by anti- smoking groups as a cringeworthy effort to lock down market share, but some others interpret the addition of these odd bedfellows as a sign of a market run amok.
The FDA “has been dealt a very difficult hand, and a lot of which includes putting the genie back — or stuffing the genie back — in the bottle,” said Erika Sward, assistant vice president of advocacy for the American Lung Association. “And I don’t envy them for that.”
Agency officials said they had used every tool within their authority to crack down on e- cigarette outlaws. Yet recent fines issued by the agency topped out at about $19,000 per violation and largely targeted a few products sold at each store. The agency’s orders telling six manufacturers to stop selling certain products were directed at U. S. stores, some of which were in small cities.
And though the FDA has fired off hundreds of warning letters, the effect is barely felt: Flavored vape sales have surged 60% over the past three years, to 18 million vaping products a month in June from 11 million a month in early 2020, according to the CDC Foundation.
“The FDA should not be having any of these flavored e- cigarettes on the market,” said Yolonda Richardson, president of the Campaign for TobaccoFree Kids. “And so it just needs to do its job.”
When the FDA received expanded authority to regulate e- cigarettes in 2016, the objective was to draw a new line in public health: Smokers would have an alternative to traditional cigarettes, and tobacco use among minors would remain at historic lows.
Seven years on, nearly 40% of e- cigarette users are 25 or younger, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And of the 2,000 or so vaping and e- cigarette products on the market, the agency has only given the green light to about two dozen of them, and it still has to deal with a backlog of applications, according to research on the industry.
There are few places where the problem feels more pressing than in high school bathrooms, where students crowd the stalls between classes to get a nicotine fix.
Teenage vaping rates have fallen roughly by half since their height during the Juul craze of 2019, to about 14% of high school students last year from nearly 28% at their peak, federal surveys show. Those rates were based on survey responses in which students said whether they had vaped within the past 30 days.
Kyle Wimmer, an art teacher at Mountain Range High School north of Denver, frequently hears from students dealing with nicotine addiction from e- cigarette use.
He accepts discarded vapes and helps young people turn them into art. And as a teacher who has been open about his past struggles with alcohol, he’s also there to listen.
“It’s hard to tell kids not to do this when they’re hooked because they can’t just stop,” Wimmer said, adding: “They’re having troubles. They’re struggling.”
A growing body of research shows that while vapes may not be as toxic as cigarettes, they are far from healthy, particularly for adolescents who become addicted to nicotine while their brains are still developing.
The American Heart Association has raised the alarm about possible cardiovascular effects from e- cigarettes and called for more research. One recent meta- analysis reported higher heart attack risks in e- cigarette users than in those who did not vape or smoke anything. (Cigarette smokers had the highest risk.)
In recent years, the market has begun to move toward high-volume vapes advertising 5,000 to 6,000 puffs — with about as much addictive nicotine
as is in a carton of cigarettes. The devices come in flavors that could appeal to younger adolescents such as birthday shake, gummy bear and watermelon ice, and they have higher concentrations of nicotine than were found before. The prices have also dropped, said Barbara Schillo, chief research officer for the Truth Initiative, who documented the trend in a recent study.
“In other words, these disposable devices are getting bigger, stronger and cheaper,” Schillo said.
Calls for change have only grown louder. In a letter sent in late August, 30 state attorneys general urged the FDA to do more to deter youth vaping and to ban all but tobacco flavored e- cigarettes.
Lawmakers, including Sen. Dick Durbin, DIll., a leading opponent of e- cigarettes, have pushed for action. His office discovered nearly two dozen types of vapes being sold online even after the FDA had denied their marketing applications and sent them warning letters.
“I just don’t understand it,” Durbin said in a floor speech last month, adding that the FDA “is cowardly, refusing to use its full arsenal of enforcement tools — fines, injunctions — for even these most flagrant cases.”
Even R. J. Reynolds, maker of Newport and Camel cigarettes and the bestselling Vuse vapes, has invoked public health in a petition lodged with the FDA seeking official action. It asked the agency to prioritize enforcement of flavored, disposable vapes.
Luis Pinto, a spokesperson for the company, said devices aimed at young people and minors threatened the efforts of Reynolds and others to convert adult smokers to e- cigarette users. “The whole category is in peril,” he said.