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Tag: youth use

  • Greece to Boost Penalties for Youth Vape Sales

    Greece to Boost Penalties for Youth Vape Sales

    Credit: Lefteris Papaulakis

    Greece is set to introduce a new bill in its Parliament that would impose stricter penalties for businesses supplying alcohol, electronic cigarettes, and vaping devices to minors in the government’s efforts to revamp alcohol laws in the country.

    This is a joint decision made by the ministries of Citizen Protection, Justice, and Health, and it comes after repeated incidents of selling alcohol to under-aged individuals.

    According to sources, violators who sell these harmful products to minors could be punished with imprisonment, financial fines, and other administrative penalties, including the immediate closure of the business involved, media reports.

    Ministerial officials report that past oversights have also been identified regarding the access minors have to these harmful products. Specifically, under the previous government, the number of police officers assigned to enforce the anti-smoking law, for example, had been drastically reduced, penalties had been minimized, and there was also a decision allowing for the use of alcohol by minors at private events.

    The Minister of Justice Giorgos Floridis commented on the new law, “Everything is now becoming stricter for the protection of minors, with increased enforcement.”

  • Altria to Use Bluetooth to Prevent Youth Use

    Altria to Use Bluetooth to Prevent Youth Use

    Image: sdx15

    Altria is finalizing submissions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Njoy products in blueberry and watermelon flavors, according to Billy Gifford, Altria CEO, reports BNN Bloomberg. The company is currently waiting for a decision from the FDA on a menthol version.

    The fruit-flavored products would use Bluetooth technology to prevent underage use, though the company has not detailed how it will do so.

    “We’ve demonstrated the age-gating restrictions are effective at preventing underage access in virtually all cases,” said Gifford at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference yesterday.

  • Schumer Wants Crackdown on Zyn

    Schumer Wants Crackdown on Zyn

    Image: Tobacco Reporter archive

    U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling for a crackdown on Zyn nicotine pouches, arguing that the product will be the next “trend in addiction for teens,” according to USA Today. He has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission to take action on the company’s marketing practices and the product’s health effects.

    “Amid federal action against e-cigs and their grip on young people, a quiet and dangerous alternative has emerged, and it is called Zyn,” said Schumer. “I am delivering a new warning to parents because these nicotine pouches seem to lock their sights on teens and use social media to hook them.”

    “The amount of nicotine is highly addictive, and much more needs to be done to understand and communicate the health risks for young people,” Schumer said.

    Zyn’s parent company said that it both meets and exceeds industry regulations.

    “The FDA remains concerned about any tobacco product that may appeal to youth,” said Brian King, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, in response. “The FDA uses a variety of surveillance tools to monitor the evolving tobacco product landscape and to identify emerging threats to public health.”

    King noted that the FDA closely monitors “those in the supply chain for compliance with federal law.”

    “As always, we are committed to holding those accountable who sell unauthorized tobacco products, including those labeled, advertised and/or designed to encourage youth use,” said King.

    The Federal Trade Commission did not comment, noting that it “does not publicly speculate on external requests for investigations or comment on letters from member[s] of Congress,” according to USA Today.

  • Juul Supports Tighter Youth Access Rules

    Juul Supports Tighter Youth Access Rules

    Credit: Piter2121

    Juul Labs wants tighter e-cigarette regulations to help stave off youth demand while also making the industry safer overall.

    In a recent open letter addressed to the Florida House of Representatives and Senate, the company urged lawmakers to endorse legislative proposals to regulate the marketplace for legal nicotine vaping products in Florida.

    The pending proposals require state regulators to develop a directory listing of certified nicotine product manufacturers and certified nicotine products. They also subject retail and wholesale nicotine product dealers to inspections or audits; prohibit sale, shipment or distribution of certain nicotine products into this state; provide criminal penalties; require entities that seek to sell nicotine products or dispensing devices to obtain a wholesale nicotine products dealer permit; provide that permit holders must consent to inspections and searches without warrant; and provide for seizure and destruction of unlawful nicotine products, according to Florida’s Senate.

    In the letter, Juul Labs said it “is on a mission to transition the world’s billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes, eliminate their use and combat underage usage of our products,” according to media reports.

    The letter highlighted what the company described as extensive efforts to ensure product quality and compliance with regulatory standards. The letter also emphasized significant investments in product development, regulatory science and manufacturing quality controls.

    Penned by Juul Labs’ regional director for state government affairs, Jennifer Cunningham, the letter states that the company wants a better-regulated market. Cunningham cited measures implemented by Juul Labs, including supporting “Tobacco 21” laws to raise the legal age for tobacco product sales to 21, restricting vaping flavors to tobacco and menthol, limiting product purchases per transaction and promoting retail partner compliance through ID checking and technology advancements.

    However, despite these efforts, the letter points out the challenges posed by a burgeoning illegal vape market in Florida, with the state being the primary destination for sales of illicit vapor products in the U.S. The vape maker also expressed readiness to assist Florida legislators in formulating policies that foster a well-regulated market for legal vapor products.

  • Teen Cigarette Use Declined Over 30 Years

    Teen Cigarette Use Declined Over 30 Years

    Image: pikselstock

    Cigarette smoking among U.S. adolescents (grades nine to 12) from 1991 to 2021 significantly decreased, according to a new study from Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Schmidt College of Medicine published in Ochsner Journal online ahead of print.

    Study findings include:

    • Ever use cigarettes significantly decreased from 70.1 percent in 1991 to 17.8 percent in 2021, an almost fourfold decline.
    • Occasional cigarette use significantly decreased from 27.5 percent in 1991 to 3.8 percent in 2021, a greater than sevenfold decline.
    • Frequent cigarette use significantly decreased from 12.7 percent to 0.7 percent, a greater than eighteenfold decline.
    • Daily cigarette use declined from 9.8 percent in 1991 to 0.6 percent in 2021, a greater than sixteenfold decline.

    While all grades experienced a significant decline in cigarette use, 12th graders consistently reported the highest percentage of occasional smokers compared to the other school grades, even in 2021. This finding suggests that while smoking has decreased across all age groups, older adolescents might still be more prone to experimenting with cigarettes than their younger counterparts.

    “The substantial decrease in cigarette use among U.S. adolescents spanning three decades is an encouraging public health achievement,” said Panagiota “Yiota” Kitsantas, senior author, professor and chair for the Department of Population Health and Social Medicine at the FAU Schmidt College of Medicine. “This decrease underscores the importance of continued vigilance, research and intervention to further reduce tobacco use and its associated harms.”

    Overall, inequalities in cigarette use among adolescents by gender have been present for decades. However, by 2021, discrepancies in smoking cigarettes by gender were diminished.

    With respect to race/ethnicity, by 2021, the decreases in cigarette consumption were even more pronounced among Black and Asian adolescents while the rates among white and Hispanic/Latino youth remained higher but were still significantly lower than the 1997 rates.

    “These results show reassuring trends, but they also suggest residual clinical and public health challenges that will require targeted interventions,” said Charles H. Hennekens, co-author, First Sir Richard Doll Professor of Medicine and senior academic advisor at the FAU Schmidt College of Medicine.

    “Quitting smoking significantly reduces risks of cardiovascular disease beginning within a matter of months and reaching the nonsmoker status within a few years, even among older adults. However, for lung and other cancers, reductions do not even begin to emerge for years after quitting and even after 10 years remain midway between the continuing smoker and lifelong nonsmoker. Thus, for reducing cardiovascular disease risks, it’s never too late to quit, but to reduce risks of cancer, it’s never too early.”

    Study co-authors are Maria Mejia, first author and an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine; Robert S. Levine, professor of family and community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and an affiliate professor at the FAU Schmidt College of Medicine; and Adedamola Adele, a recent biomedical science graduate at the FAU Schmidt College of Medicine.

  • First Trial for Juul Youth Marketing Claims

    First Trial for Juul Youth Marketing Claims

    Credit: Mehaniq41

    A trial against Juul Labs and Altria for youth marketing begins today in Minnesota, USA. It is the first state to go to trial against the e-cigarette manufacturer and tobacco company.

    Jury selection in the trial comes more than three years after Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison first filed a lawsuit against Juul Labs, reports CARE11.

    “We will prove how Juul and Altria deceived and hooked a generation of Minnesota youth on their products, causing both great harm to the public and great expense to the state to remediate that harm,” said Ellison in a press release.

    Minnesota is the first case to go to trial against Juul since more than a dozen states sued the company beginning in 2019.

    “It’s a pretty significant case,” said David Schultz, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. “The case comes down to two or three basic issues. First, it’s about the claim that Juul marketed to minors. Second, it did nothing in terms of trying to prevent minors from accessing their product. And third, it was about the fact that they did not make appropriate disclosures regarding the health and safety risks surrounding the use of vaping and some of these smokeless tobaccos.”

    The state believes Juul Labs, enabled by Altria, “engaged in consumer fraud, negligence and created a public nuisance.”

    Altria Group exchanged its entire investment in Juul Labs for a nonexclusive, irrevocable global license to certain of Juul’s heated-tobacco intellectual property in early March.

    This isn’t new territory for the state. Minnesota was the first state in the country to successfully sue the tobacco industry and win in the 1990s.

    Earlier this year, a U.S. district judge handed Juul Labs preliminary court approval of a $255 million settlement resolving claims by consumers that it deceptively marketed e-cigarettes, as the company seeks to resolve thousands of lawsuits.

    The company reached a nearly $24 million settlement with the city of Chicago in mid-March.

    Juul and Altria have denied the allegations.

    In court documents from November 2022, the defendants stated, “Minnesota has reaped billions of dollars from tobacco settlements and taxes over the last decade for the purpose of preventing tobacco use and remedying its harms. Yet even after determining that there was an alleged youth vaping problem among Minnesota youth, time and again the state chose to ignore recommended tobacco prevention funding guidelines and instead used these funds to bankroll unrelated projects—like the Minnesota Vikings football stadium.”

  • The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

    The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

    Photo: kurgu128

    The idea that e-cigarette flavors hook kids is simple, compelling—and false.

    By Clive Bates

    In a fact sheet titled “Flavored E-cigarettes Hook Kids,” the U.S.-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids asserts that “Flavored e-cigarettes are undermining the nation’s overall efforts to reduce youth tobacco use and putting a new generation of kids at risk of nicotine addiction and the serious health harms that result from tobacco use.” Let us call this “the activist proposition.”

    The challenge with simple but false activist propositions is that refuting them can require a lengthy embrace of more complex arguments. Brandolini’s law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, can be expressed: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.” In this article, we shall demonstrate Brandolini’s law by addressing the simple but false activist proposition about flavored e-cigarettes through a series of questions.

    First, do flavors cause youth tobacco or nicotine use? The activist proposition builds in an assumption that flavors cause e-cigarette use. Lots of young people use flavored e-cigarettes. Therefore, it is claimed, flavored e-cigarettes must cause young people to use e-cigarettes. But how likely is that? We know from the past that a high proportion of young people can use tobacco if they choose to, mostly without flavors. According to the Monitoring the Future survey, for most of the 1990s, U.S. 12th-grade past 30-day cigarette smoking prevalence was at or above 30 percent. By 2021, teenage cigarette smoking had fallen around 4 percent, but nicotine vaping had reached 20 percent. Perhaps there is a persistent demand for nicotine or tobacco, regardless of whether it is flavored. Also, let’s look over time. In the United States, high school past 30-day vaping was 11.3 percent in 2016, rose to 27.5 percent in 2019 but fell to 14.1 percent by 2022. Yet there was very little change in the availability of flavored e-cigarettes to explain these swings. There are also countries where flavors are widely available but youth vaping is relatively low. Take the U.K., for example, which takes a positive approach to tobacco harm reduction and vaping. Thousands of flavored products are available, but according to a recent official evidence assessment, youth vaping remains below 10 percent. And the U.K. offers us a further important insight: “[D]ata showed that most young people who had never smoked were also not currently vaping (98.3 percent).” This tells us that vaping is highly concentrated in adolescents already open to tobacco use.

    Second, so what does cause youth tobacco or nicotine use? Most of the evidence points to characteristics of the individual and their circumstances not tobacco product features. Tobacco use is driven by a complex mix of psychosocial factors, including genetics, parental smoking, poverty, delinquency, rebelliousness, low self-esteem, peer group, etc. A 2016 literature review identified 98 conceptually different potential predictors of smoking onset. A 2019 study looked at stated reasons for e-cigarette use and concluded there were two main drivers: “alternative to cigarettes” and the “larger social environment.” For some young people, tobacco or nicotine use may have functional benefits. It may modulate stress or anxiety, improve concentration or help control conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For others, it may be just frivolous and experimental. In 2019, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked young people why they vaped; the top reason was, “I was curious about them.”

    Third, what would teenage vapers do if they were not vaping? Implicit in the activist proposition is the idea that removing flavors will remove the reason to vape and stop the user from vaping. At one level, there is some truth in this. If the products are bland, unpleasant or tasteless, perhaps no one will use them. But here is the problem: What if the demand for tobacco and nicotine has deeper psychosocial causes, such as those discussed above? Removing the flavored products does not make the demand go away. Would the teenage vapers just give up vaping and do more homework and piano practice instead? If the underlying demand remains, that is unlikely. Teenagers interested in nicotine might revert to cigarettes, cigars or other tobacco products. We have some evidence for this: When e-liquid flavors were banned in San Francisco in 2019, there was an increase in teenage smoking compared to other areas where flavors had not been banned. This is hardly a surprise—in one study, young adults were asked what they would do if e-cigarette flavors were banned. About one-third said they were likely to switch to cigarettes.

    In 2022, Boston-based public health scientists Mike Siegel and Amanda Katchmar reviewed the body of evidence on youth smoking and vaping, concluding that it “suggests that youth e-cigarette use has instead worked to replace a culture of youth smoking.” Economic analysis also backs this idea—when prices of e-cigarettes increase, youth vaping falls, but youth smoking rises. That tells us that e-cigarettes and cigarettes function as substitutes. If regulators ban e-cigarette flavors, then they should not be surprised if more smoking is the result. For that reason, Siegel and Katchmar concluded “[W]e propose a reevaluation of current policies surrounding e-cigarette sales so that declines in e-cigarette use will not come at the cost of increasing cigarette use among youth and adults.” That is very troubling for the activist proposition—it means policies to address youth vaping cannot be evaluated without concern for their effect on youth smoking. It also means that some youth vaping may be a diversion from smoking and is beneficial. It follows that regulation discouraging vaping could easily be harmful.

    Fourth, how would a ban on flavors work? The logic of the activist proposition is that a ban on flavored products would remove flavored products from the market, thus removing the reason for young people to vape. But that is not how prohibitions work in practice. A prohibition does not cause the prohibited product to disappear. But in practice, a prohibition causes the perturbation of a market. It causes changes to the behavior of consumers, legal and illegal suppliers, prices and availability. Foreseeable consequences include switching to cigarettes or other tobacco products; switching to other substances; switching e-cigarettes to the permitted flavors; illicit trade in flavored liquids; home mixing and informal selling; cross-border trade or internet sales; stockpiling and workarounds such as sales of flavors for aromatherapy. Prohibitions change the supply side, and rarely for the better. There should be no mystery about this: Despite longstanding prohibition, the Monitoring the Future survey shows that U.S. 12th-grade past 30-day cannabis use has been around 20 percent and daily use around 5 percent for about the past 25 years. Some of these responses to flavor prohibition will clearly increase harm compared to vaping. Because smoking is so much more harmful, it would only take a slight uptick in smoking to offset any benefit of significantly reduced teenage vaping. But there are also hazards arising from informal manufacturing and workarounds. Illicit supply will bring adolescents into contact with criminal networks as consumers and potentially as low-level participants.

    Fifth, what is really going on with youth vaping? I believe there are two broad patterns of youth vaping and two distinct behaviors at work, but these are often conflated. The first is frivolous and experimental use, where young people try new things. This has characteristics of a frothy fad: infrequent use, transient and unpredictable. The second is more determined nicotine use: frequent, intense and entrenched. But this group is more likely to be the adolescents who would otherwise be using cigarettes or other tobacco products. The first group contributes to the “youth vaping epidemic” narrative but is not really a cause for great public health concern. The second group represents the migration of nicotine use in society to far safer technologies and is likely beneficial for public health. The activist proposition, however, requires policymakers to believe there is no latent demand for nicotine use and that removing products will eliminate nicotine from society. But it is much more plausible to think of the demand for nicotine in similar terms to alcohol, caffeine, cannabis and other recreational substances. People use nicotine for a reason, and there will be a long-term demand for it. The task for policymakers and regulators is to make that acceptably safe and to resist simplistic activist propositions that are likely to do more harm than good.

    In November 2022, the Campaign For Tobacco Free Kids celebrated the success of a mass activist campaign to secure Proposition 31, a ban on flavored products in California. They may have won their political battle, and their aggressive promotion of the activist proposition has again prevailed. But nowhere in its advocacy literature does this powerful coalition level with California’s voters about the underlying drivers of youth nicotine use, the linkages between smoking and vaping, and the risks of unintended consequences. They can deny this real-world complexity, but policies built on bullshit have a nasty tendency to go wrong, to do more harm than good and to call into question the credibility of their advocates.

    Clive Bates is the director of Counterfactual Consulting and the former director of Action on Smoking and Health (U.K.).