Sales of e-cigarettes shot up by nearly 50 percent during Covid, driven by the rise of sweet-flavored vape devices, official data shows.
A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found there were over 7 million more e-cigarette products sold in America in December 2022 compared to 15.5 million in January 2020 (a rise of nearly 47 percent).
While sales of menthol versions – formerly the most popular flavor – fell slightly, sales of fruit and sweet flavored devices rose from 29 percent to nearly 41 percent.
Experts told Dm.com today that the super-strength devices in US were getting people addicted in ‘matter of days’, due to a lack of regulation in America they characterized as a ‘wild west’ situation.
The maximum level of nicotine permitted in a vape is fixed at 20 milligrams of nicotine per milliliter of liquid (two percent) in Europe, the UK, and Canada. These devices last for around 550 to 600 puffs. In the US, it’s fairly easy to find a device or pod containing as much as 5 percent nicotine
Tobacco use among 11 to 18 year olds has risen by almost a quarter compared to last year, estimates suggest. The CDC warns, however, against the comparison because in 2021 the surveys had to be done from home due to the pandemic. This may have affected the results
The CDC report was based on information from Information Resources, Inc., a data analytics and market research firm.
Researchers at the CDC said: ‘In the United States, the prevalence of e-cigarette use is markedly higher among youths and young adults than it is among adults overall.
‘Increases in the number of available e-cigarette brands during the study period and changes observed in the top five brands during December 2022 reflect the dynamic nature of the e-cigarette market.’
E-cigarettes, especially disposable devices with sky-high amounts of nicotine, have been flying off the shelves in recent years, with sales ballooning more than 46 percent during the Covid pandemic.
The rate at which American high school students used e-cigarettes regularly jumped 25 percent from 2021 to 2022, driven primarily by disposable devices such as the mega-popular Elf Bar.
In fact, sales of disposable vapes more than doubled from January 2020 to December 2022, with nearly 52 percent of total e-cigarette unit sales being disposables last year.
The disposable formatted e-cigarettes are ‘capable of delivering thousands of “puffs” that might permit higher nicotine consumption per unit,’ according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Matthew Myers, President of the national advocacy group Campaign for Tobacco- Free Kids told DailyMail.com that the astronomical sales increases were indicative of a lack of full-throated government effort to monitor youth use compared to what is seen in other countries.
‘It’s a critically important difference between the United States and the UK, and now Canada, in the EU, in terms of our failure to at all regulate or control levels of nicotine in these products.
A lack of federal regulation over flavors and nicotine content has led to a patchwork of state- and city-level restrictions
The Food and Drug Administration knew as far back as 2013 that e-cigarettes, particularly those with flavored e-liquids, was poised to become a major public health crisis among teens
He added: ‘In the US, what we’ve seen is that even as the prevalence of using these products has varied over time, each of the last five years the percentage of kids who experiment, who go on to become addicted in the United States has grown.
‘And it’s a direct result of how much nicotine is in products in the US and with how it’s delivered’
The United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union have limits on the amount of nicotine permitted in an e-cigarette, while disposable devices have been outright banned in Australia.
The maximum level of nicotine permitted in a vape is fixed at 20 milligrams of nicotine per milliliter of liquid (two percent) in Europe, the UK, and Canada. These devices last for around 550 to 600 puffs.
But in the US, where one can find a vape with as much as five percent nicotine with ease, those concentrations have been steadily rising for some time. An Elf Bar BC5000 device, which contains five percent nicotine, holds about 5,000 puffs worth.
With such high concentrations of the highly addictive chemical in every puff, children can become hooked within a matter of days.
The effects of such limits are made plain in youth vaping figures from both the US and the UK – over nine percent of American teens use e-cigarettes compared to slightly less than eight percent in Britain.
More than 14 percent of high school students in the US – about 2.14 million teens – currently use e-cigarettes.
Dr Ashley Merianos, a professor at the University of Cincinnati with expertise in youth tobacco exposure told DailyMail.com: ‘I am optimistic that decreasing nicotine levels can reduce the likelihood that teens will become addicted to vaping products and will decrease the likelihood that they will initiate the use of other tobacco products such as combustible cigarettes.
‘This is an important strategy since nicotine use during adolescence can lead to nicotine dependence and impaired brain development.’
The staggering amount of nicotine in American e-cigarettes ballooned 76 percent from January 2017 to March 2022 according to a March study published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.
This is in part due to the advent of nicotine salts, which combine the unpleasant-tasting chemical derived from the tobacco plant with benzoic acid. The result is a massive dose of the highly addictive compound being sent directly to the brain.
More than 2.5 million US children use e-cigarettes – rising a half-million from last year and reversing downward trends in recent years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) reports that 2.55 million Americans in middle or high school admit using the device in the past 30 days. It is a jump of 500,000, or of 24 per cent, from 2021. It is the first increase since the CDC started gathering annual data in 2019
Dr Michael Steinberg, a physician at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and director of the Rutgers University Tobacco Dependence Program said: ‘If you use the products often enough, regardless of nicotine concentration, they can be highly addictive…nicotine is that strong of a drug.
‘Perhaps more so than the overall concentration of nicotine in the device, the speed of delivery of the nicotine may be a more important factor in how addictive a product might be.
‘Some of the vaping devices that use nicotine salts can deliver nicotine much more rapidly to the brain than the earlier generations of [electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS)].’
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: ‘Monthly average nicotine strength of disposable e-cigarettes more than doubled during the study period.
‘These disposable devices entered the market with a high nicotine strength of 5% to 6% and have grown in popularity since. They also come in various flavors attractive to youth such as beverage, candy or sweet, and fruit.’
The federal government in the US has no nicotine cap and most restrictions on vaping sales and flavors are decided at the state level, creating a muddled patchwork of laws.
In Massachusetts, for instance, a statewide ban on all flavors except for tobacco has helped drive down overall vape sales. Many states have no such flavor ban in place but have gradually chipped away at access over time such as through bans on online sales.
Having first appeared on the scene in the early 2000s, e-cigarettes took off in earnest about a decade ago with the mega-popular Juul brand dominating the market and lifting sales of the entire e-cigarette category.
Splashy advertising on social media featuring attractive stars and high-profile endorsements thrust e-cigarettes, particularly Juul, into the limelight with the promise of satisfying nicotine cravings while holding back the thousands of carcinogens and volatile chemicals found in traditional cigarette smoke.
The CDC and FDA-led study also found that children who mostly got Fs were most likely to vape or use another tobacco product. A grade students were least likely to
The federal government has tried several times with varying success to tamp down on what lawmakers and anti-smoking activists argued was insidious marketing directly to impressionable youth and first-time nicotine users with the most to lose from picking up the devices.
The Food and Drug Administration knew as far back as 2013 that e-cigarettes, particularly those with flavored e-liquids, was poised to become a major public health crisis among teens.
The agency under former President Obama failed to initiate a flavor ban in 2015 when confronted with heavy lobbying from big spenders in the vaping industry.
The Trump administration also failed to enact a meaningful flavor ban, scaling the proposed ban back to cover only the minty and fruity flavors in pod-based devices such as Juuls.
This led to a predicable consumer shift in which teens flocked to vapes without cartridges such as the Puff Bar.
Mr Myers said: ‘Today, the market is split roughly 50-50. What happens is when you remove one flavor from the market, but not all flavors from the market, the kids simply move to the other flavored products.’
‘And that’s exactly what happened three years ago, when our government opened up the door to disposables. The lesson isn’t you’ve got to now come down on disposables. The lesson is you need to have a comprehensive approach.’
And Congress has tried mored than once without success to implement the same two percent cap on nicotine content in vapes as has been implemented in peer countries.
The FDA has been blamed for an anemic response to the teen vaping epidemic.
Anti-tobacco groups such as the Truth Initiative have said that the agency must shift away from targeting small, online retailers of illicit products and instead focus its regulatory efforts on physical retail locations that do not properly screen their customers.
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