The FDA wanted to ban flavored vapes years ago, but top Obama officials nixed the plan despite studies that showed vaping was more than just inhaling water vapor. It also contains nicotine, which is considered as addictive as heroin and cocaine.
Now there have been renewed calls for a ban following a rash of deaths associated with vaping. Doctors are pushing for the nation’s 3.6 million young users to quit but that is easier said than done. Many vapers have become addicted.
While Black youth lag behind white youth in the adoption of e-cigarettes, the industry has been aggressively marketing to the Black community, which as a whole has been disproportionately affected by the use of tobacco products.
When the FDA went to the Obama Administration with its worries and a plan for a ban, the tobacco industry intervened. .”Over the course of 46 days, a deluge of more than 100 tobacco industry lobbyists and small business advocates met with White House officials as they weighed whether to include the ban as part of a new tobacco control rule,” The Los Angeles Times reported.
The ban never went through and vaping use exploded. In just three years, (by 2014) vaping in middle and high schools increased by nearly 800 percent, according to the CDC. The main reason was that the product came in flavors such as Kool-Aid, Jolly Ranchers, and Life Savers. In other words, flavors favored by young people.
By 2018, about 4.9 million middle and high school students were using tobacco products, up from 3.6 million the prior year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The FDA seemed to have been trying to prevent this. An October 2015 draft of the flavored vape ban read: “Given the attractiveness of flavors, especially to youth and young adults, and the impact flavored tobacco products may have on youth initiation. This would mean that flavored e-cigarette fluid would have been removed from the market by November 2016.
This plan was dismissed after the tobacco industry met with the Obama Administration.
There are now more than 10,000 vaping flavors on the market.
