Georgia officials warn teens to avoid e-cigarettes

“Youth and young adults should not be encouraged to use e-cigarettes and youth should have restricted access”, said Kelder.

“The concern is both that this will be an easy way for teenagers to become tobacco users and also that e-cigarettes themselves may present some health problems down the road that we don’t know about”, explained Dr. Elisabeth Ihler, a doctor at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center.

Nicolay, a former vaper, said she enjoyed the candy flavors of vaping products.

The battery-powered devices heat a liquid containing nicotine into a vapour that is inhaled, and some experts worry that a new generation of smokers is becoming addicted. “This doesn’t answer all the questions people have about e-cigarettes, but it provides a scientific base to guide policy decisions and future discussions”.

In the United States, tobacco-control advocates have taken a hard line on e-cigarettes, treating them as no different and no safer than regular cigarettes.

Sixteen percent of high school students have reported using e-cigarettes in the last month and nearly 40 percent have tried them at some point, Benard Dryer, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the same press conference. They think these are not tobacco products and that they are benign water vapor.

Public education campaigns targeted to youth and young adults, like Truth Initiative’s truth, ® campaign have made tremendous advances in preventing youth from using an array of tobacco products. “If we can move smokers to less harmful nicotine products, we can save thousands of lives”.

Fortunately, the final tobacco deeming rule, released this May, will help to rein in the e-cigarette industry. “They have substantial amounts of addictive nicotine and are being marketed to attract a young population”.

To make his point, he compares trading conventional tobacco for e-cigarettes to switching from drinking a gallon of vodka every day to drinking a gallon of beer.

The FDA banned e-cigarette sales to minors earlier this year, as part of the agency’s long-awaited plan to extend its regulatory powers across all tobacco products.

“More studies are needed to elucidate the nature of any true causal relationship between e-cigarette and combustible tobacco product use”, it said.

While youth vaping is up, use of cigarettes is dropping to historic lows.

Some studies, including one by the Royal College of Physicians, have claimed that e-cigs and vaporizers are up to 95 percent less harmful than traditional cigarettes. Half of the students who had tried e-cigarettes encountered marketing in retail settings and 40 percent saw messages on the internet. “The report illustrates that while electronic cigarettes are less harmful than cigarettes, they are not harmless”. If vapers are also more likely to have used regular cigarettes, it could mean they used e-cigarettes to quit smoking or it could mean e-cigarettes were a gateway to regular smoking. E-cigarette use, or any nicotine use for that matter, has more negative consequences for brain development and health among young people, the report said, than for older adults.

“We look forward to working alongside the new administration and Congress on the Surgeon General’s recommendations to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to live tobacco-free”.

Dreyer praised the report, noting, “When the Surgeon General comes out with a report, it gives a lot of heft to these concerns”.