The Power Behind the Vape

We know smoking is a truly bad habit.  It smells bad, shortens lives and causes a litany of slow-killing diseases. We’ve known about it for a very long time, despite tobacco industry’s efforts to pretend to the contrary. The billions of dollars of successful litigation against tobacco products conclusively proves how wrong that effort was. Looking at the hard numbers, you might think that efforts to encourage smoking are over,

“About 50 years ago, roughly 42 percent of U.S. adults smoked. It was common nearly everywhere - in office buildings, restaurants, airplanes and even hospitals. The smoking rate's gradual decline has coincided with an increased public understanding that smoking is a cause of cancer, heart disease and other lethal health problems.” CBSNews.com, 5/24/17 

According to Wikipedia, by 2009, only “46.6 million, or 20.6 percent of adults 18 and older were current smokers…. An estimated 36.5 million people, or 15.1% of all adults (aged 18 years or older), in the United States smoked cigarettes in 2015. 

“Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, accounting for approximately 443,000 deaths, or 1 of every 5 deaths, in the United States each year. Cigarette smoking alone has cost the United States $96 billion in direct medical expenses and $97 billion in lost productivity per year or an average of $4,260 per adult smoker.”

There’s a lot of money in tobacco, so with all the appropriate warning labels, the tobacco industry needed to find a way to reignite America’s smoking habit. But this one you cannot lay on Donald Trump. Maybe the Obama administration, which let this happen, could not foresee how vaping was just another marketing path to full on smoking, packaged to lure the youngest into that life-killing habit. After all, the vaping companies were touting their products as a path for smokers to reduce and then quit their nicotine consumption. That’s not exactly what happened, is it? It seems that the government thought the regulations would be too tough on small retailers, so… 

Emily Baumgaertner writing for the October 1^st Los Angeles Times explains how we got here: “Unicorn Vomit. Cotton Candy. Gummy Bear. Skittles… Some teenagers who tried these playful vaping flavors thought they were just inhaling water vapor — not also nicotine, a chemical considered as addictive as heroin and cocaine.

“Now, as a mysterious vaping-related lung disease has doctors and parents urging the nation’s 3.6 million young users to quit, many are finding that they physically can’t — they’re hooked. It’s exactly the kind of youth addiction crisis the Food and Drug Administration had warned of four years ago when it tried to ban flavored fluids for e-cigarettes… If the FDA ban had gone through, the kid-friendly vaping liquids would have been pushed off store shelves.

“Instead, 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 end result: Senior Obama administration officials nixed the ban and much of the evidence supporting it, according to documents reviewed by The Times… By 2014, the CDC reported that in just three years, vaping in middle and high schools had increased by nearly 800%... A national survey by the FDA and the National Institutes of Health asked young people who vaped why they did it. More than 80% marked the answer: ‘It comes in flavors I like.’

“FDA documents given to White House officials ahead of their deliberations suggested that was no coincidence. The flavor ingredients in some tobacco were the same as those in Kool-Aid, Jolly Ranchers and Life Savers… ‘The chemicals largely overlapped with similarly labeled ‘cherry,’ ‘grape,’ ‘apple,’ ‘peach’ and ‘berry’ tobacco products,’ the FDA wrote.

“Some e-liquid flavors were found to be poisonous in high doses, according to the FDA. Studies showed that several cinnamon-flavored e-liquids contained a cinnamaldehyde, a chemical that experts at the FDA called ‘highly toxic to human cells.’ And some cotton candy and bubble gum flavors contained aldehydes, a class of chemicals that can cause airway constriction.

“The FDA was already preparing a so-called ‘deeming rule,’ which brought new products like e-cigarettes under the agency’s jurisdiction. A draft of the rule shows that the agency planned to use the opportunity to take a bold stance against flavors… ‘Given the attractiveness of flavors, especially to youth and young adults, and the impact flavored tobacco products may have on youth initiation,’ a draft of the rule read in October 2015, any flavored e-cigarette fluid would have been removed from the market within 90 days of when the rule took effect. That would have been November 2016.

“The ban gained widespread support from scientists and public health experts and, on Oct. 19, 2015, headed to the White House for approval… On Nov. 3, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB — tasked with evaluating the economic impact of major rules — took its first meeting with a critic of the ban: Schell Hammel, owner of the Vapor Bar, a flavored e-liquid shop, including its premium vaping line — called ‘Forbidden.’

“Dillon Taylor, then a lawyer at the Small Business Administration, accompanied Hammel. Taylor had submitted public comments that opposed the rule in 2014, calling it ‘disproportionately burdensome to small entities.’ This was his first of more than 45 meetings at OMB over just seven weeks… In that time, OMB hosted more than 100 advocates battling the tobacco rule: At least 44 meetings were with bands of industry representatives. About seven were with public health experts…

“[By early 2016,] the meetings stopped… For 88 days — from early February through early May — there were no public meetings logged about the rule… Then, on May 10, 2016, the rule was published, establishing FDA’s oversight of e-cigarettes. The flavor ban was missing. So were more than 15 pages of evidence detailing the role that flavors were expected to play in the youth vaping upsurge… The FDA, the rule said, was seeking ‘further data on the role of flavored products in youth initiation.’

“‘You look at these enormous chunks crossed out, and think, ‘How could this possibly have seemed good for public health?’ ’ said Eric Lindblom, a former official in the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products who now leads tobacco work at Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute… ‘It’s as if they looked at each other and said, ‘If we’re not going to do anything about this problem, let’s delete anything that suggests we should.’ It’s a horror story,” he said.

“That August, when the rule went into effect, teenagers returned to school, and Juul catapulted to success, with brick-and-mortar sales skyrocketing more than 640% in one year. Altria, the company that lobbied the White House, went on to purchase a 35% stake in the company. [Andrew Perraut, a] former OMB staffer, became a public policy director for Juul, according to his LinkedIn page… There are now more than 10,000 vaping flavors.”  Juul has stopped its marketing efforts, but its products are still out there along with their competitors. And there are plenty of new customers who don’t need to be marketed to anymore. They are hooked.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and now we have a two-fer problem: banning the child-luring vaping phenomenon and then dealing with the newly created addicts.