Vaping on the Rise: How The E-Cigarette Industry Mirrors The Tobacco Industry

Kendall Spencer Eugene, Oregon

E-cigarette use by teens is rising at the fastest recorded rate for any substance.

Vaping in recent years has seen an explosion -- yet not among the manufacturer’s intended demographics. The vaping trend has skyrocketed . A new Vital Signs report from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention says 4.9 million high-school and middle students used tobacco products in the last thirty days. This is an increase of 1.5 million from 2017. E-cigarettes are the most popular tobacco based product among children and teens.

The report follows a long trend of studies documenting a surge in vaping amongst the youth demographic. A late 2018 health survey from the University of Michigan showed vaped nicotine use nearly double from 11 percent to 21 percent in seniors who say they used nicotine in the last thirty days. In a press release Richard Miech the lead author of the survey said, “Vaping is reversing hard-fought declines in the number of adolescents who use nicotine.These results suggest that vaping is leading youth into nicotine use and nicotine addiction, not away from it.”

The rapid uptick in vaping and nicotine has sent regulators scrambling to catch up. On February 11 Scott Gottlieb the director for the Food and Drug Administration said in a statement calling for stronger regulations on e-cigarettes. “Based on a growing body of evidence, I fear the youth trends continued in 2019, forcing us to make some tough decisions about the regulatory status of e-cigarettes. The signs that we’re seeing are not encouraging.” he said in a statement.

The FDA has moved to curb sales of e-cigarette products to youth through a series of enforcement actions. In September of 2018 the FDA ordered the e-cigarette industry to submit “robust” plans on how to prevent youth vaping. Later in November the FDA banned the sale of most sweet flavored e-cigarette flavors from gas and convenience stores.

The scene at local bars around the UO campus are the same loud pop music, loud indistinct conversations, and people lounging on patios smoking. One of those smokers is Andrew Miller a student at the UO. He started his smoking habit with a Juul. “Everyone was using it. I liked the design of it, but the biggest appeal was it’s discretion,” he said on why he liked Juul. It is not hard to see why Juul appealed to Miller.

A tide of rapidly rising nicotine use amongst teenagers follows a well-worn trail blazed by e-cigarettes predecessors the tobacco industry. The vaping industry has found ways to effectively market their products to young people with two in one whammy: a sleek and high-tech design married with a highly addictive product. The question remains about the long term health risks about vaping nicotine for this generation.

Understanding the rising trend amongst teenagers who vape you need to know about Juul. Juul is a popular and controversial e-cigarette company that helped vaping go viral. The company’s goal is “improving the lives of the world's one billion adult smokers by eliminating cigarettes.” The device itself was created by two Stanford design graduates, who were former smokers. They wanted to craft a device that looked high tech and discrete. So, the founders created a e-cigarette device that easily looks like a USB flash drive and fits into your hand.

The sleek design of the Juul device was paired with an advertising campaign designed to appeal to a youth-oriented market. A team of researchers at the Stanford Research Into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising have published a white paper analyzing Juul’s launch in 2015 to 2018. They scoured through Instagram posts, emails, and ads. They came to one conclusion. Juul’s advertising “was patently youth oriented.”

In a statement Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns said the company’s purpose is to wipe out cigarettes and help smokers switch to an alternative and quit cigarettes altogether. “At the same time, we are committed to deterring young people, as well as adults who do not currently smoke, from using our products. We cannot be more emphatic on this point: No young person or non-nicotine user should ever try (Juul),” Burns said.

The finding is significant to understanding the surging rates of vaping amongst youth in America, which is viewed as an emerging new health crisis. Juul’s product launch event consisted of good-looking young people distributing free Juul devices at movie and music events. “The principal focus of these activities was to get a group of youthful influencers to accept gifts of JuulL products,” the report says, “to try out their various flavors, and then to popularize their products among their peers.”

The following campaign for Juul was their “Vaporized” campaign. Where colorful ads -- exploded across billboards, magazines, and social media -- featured playful 20 something models.

Juul’s early “Vaporized” campaign shows young people having fun.

Juul’s early campaigns are reminiscent of the tobacco industry marketing targeting youth demographics according to an advertising analysis by the same Stanford group. The e-cigarette market expanded forty percent in 2017 to be a $1.16 billion market. The insane growth was driven by Juul. In March 2017, Juul Labs dominated the market the lion’s share of the e-cigarette retail market sales in the United States according to Nielsen data.

Source: Nielsen Total US xAOC/Convenience Database and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC

The FDA launched an investigation in 2018 into whether Juul was actively advertising to teenagers. An ex-senior manager at Juul Labs said to the New York Times that the company knew their advertising campaign could appeal to them. The company quickly realized teenagers were using them through social media posts where teens were obvious vaping with Juuls.

The advertising and design of Juul were engineered to entice teenagers into seeking the product. It was the science behind Juul that got them addicted. The success of Juul is derived from the use of nicotine salts that deliver a smoother hit than traditional cigarettes or e-cigarette products at the time. The smoother draw nicotine salts afforded allowed inexperienced smokers to become more easily addicted to Juul’s product. Juul also ramped up the nicotine content of their pods to a five percent concentration a comparable amount as a full pack of cigarettes. Other e-cigarette manufacturers had at the time been producing one to percent to two percent pods. The result according to a recent 2018 published study has been an explosion of increasing concentrations of nicotine content in e-cigarette pods and devices.

Juul and other e-cigarette makers say their devices help adult smokers quit smoking cigarettes. The FDA released a meta-analysis in 2018 of studies on the health benefits of e-cigarettes. Their findings broadly support the industry’s claim; however, the report calls for more study of the long term health impact vaping has. The report furthermore said teens using e-cigarettes were at substantial risk of transitioning to cigarettes.

The risk to teens has led to public health officials calling for tougher regulations on e-cigarettes aimed at teens. Surgeon General said on Politico’s Pulse Check podcast in late 2018, “I don't want anyone to think I'm against the harm-reduction potential of these devices for adults. But 3 percent of adults are using these devices — [and] 20 percent of high schoolers are using these devices.”

The spike in tobacco use amongst teens and middle-schoolers has left regulators and public health officials scrambling to address the issue. The FDA now is pursuing aggressive enforcement actions against the e-cigarette industry, but the real fight is happening at the state and local level.

Oregon has been leading the charge in this respect. In 2014 Lane County passed a measure raising the minimum age to smoke from 18 to 21. The state passed the same measure three years later. The results of a statewide health survey of teens in 2017 show the vast majority of teens are not using tobacco products, but state officials are moving to take action. Christy Inskip a public health official for Lane County talked about some of these efforts. “The county has taken several steps to try and stem the rising tide of e-cigarette use amongst teenagers. We started by making sure every e-cigarette seller is licensed, expanding our educational outreach to school, and expanding smoking free zones,” she said.

In the coming years as the e-cigarette industry matures parallels between it and the tobacco industry are made. These accusations are given greater weight with the tobacco giant Altria Group recently invested $12.8 billion dollars into Juul Labs in late 2018.