Outlaw vape marketing to young people

Young people who have never smoked are a primary target for vaping devices, and their nicotine addiction.

As vaping devices first were mass-marketed more than a decade ago to help smokers get off tobacco, many experts warned that the devices posed addiction dangers of their own and that they would be marketed to young people.

The industry insisted that the devices were intended only to help smokers quit rather than to lure non-smokers, without explaining why the liquids vaporized in the devices came in flavors such as bubble gum.

There is little question that vaping is safer than smoking tobacco because the vapor does not deliver the carcinogenic tar produced by cigarettes. But safer is not the same thing as safe.

Vaping helps smoking addicts by eliminating the tobacco but it works by delivering nicotine, the addictive substance in tobacco, often in higher amounts than in individual cigarettes.

But now, young people who never have smoked are a primary market for vaping devices, and nicotine keeps them coming back.

A study released earlier this year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that vaping led students to smoke cigarettes, although it did not determine whether they became habitual or one-time cigarette smokers.

And a National Institute on Drug Abuse study found that students who had only vaped while in high school were four times more likely to try tobacco after graduating, than those who had not vaped.

The New York Times reported last week on a disturbing national trend in which thousands of students clandestinely vape while in class, using devices that the industry supposedly does not market to young people.

Using the same regulatory techniques that have helped to vastly reducing national smoking rates and the misery that comes with the addiction, federal and state governments should outlaw vape marketing to young people.

— The Wilkes-Barre Citizens’ Voice, The Associated Press

Young people who never have smoked are a primary market for vaping devices, and nicotine keeps them coming back.