Nearly 70 Percent of US Youth See Ads for E-cigarettes

“Adding e-cigarettes and other tobacco products to the list of current tobacco products prohibited from being sent through the U.S. mail and requiring age verification for online sales at purchase and delivery could also prevent sales to youths”, they wrote. They deliver flavored nicotine in vapor form. FDA has announced its intention to regulate e-cigarettes and other now unregulated tobacco products as part of this Act.

“Implementation of comprehensive efforts to reduce youth exposure to e-cigarette advertising and promotion is critical to reduce e-cigarette experimentation and use among youths”, the study authors concluded.

E-cigarette makers are pouring tens of millions of dollars into advertising their wares – and teenagers are getting the message loud and clear, federal health officials reported Tuesday.

“Kids should not be using e-cigarettes and yet 2/3 of kids in this country are seeing e-cigarette ads”.

This marketing works. From 2011 to 2014, past-month e-cigarette use jumped from 1.5 percent to 13.4 percent among high school students and from 0.6 percent to 3.9 percent among middle school students. Overall, 55% of survey respondents saw e-cigarettes advertised in retail stores, 40% saw ads for them on the Internet, 37% encountered them while watching movies or television, and 30% noticed them in magazines and newspapers. Every other source of exposure was basically the same as conventional cigarettes, however; kids are seeing a lot of ads for e-cigs. The agency also suggests limiting tobacco product sales to facilities that never admit youth, and restricting how close stores can be to schools – strategies that, although valid, don’t seem all that feasible at this point.

Unrestricted marketing of e-cigarettes has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of vaping youths, raising concerns about health dangers and a new generation of people addicted to nicotine, The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2014 proposed asserting its authority over new tobacco products including e-cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco and nicotine gels. “But if you then relapse to using conventional cigarettes… if, like three out of four adults who use e-cigarettes, you’re continuing to smoke – you’re not going to see that health benefit”.

Public Health England says e-cigarettes are far less harmful than tobacco and help smokers quit.

“The e-cigarette advertisements that we’re seeing is like the old-time Wild West,”CDC director Tom Frieden said in a press conference today”.

Cigarette smoking rates among middle school students dropped from 4.3 percent in 2011 to 2.5 percent in 2014, according to the CDC. Last year, states only spent 1.9 percent of combined tobacco revenues – $25.6 billion – on such programs, or less than 15 percent of the CDC’s recommended level of funding for all states combined.