Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on September 12 announced an
agency initiative to “address [the] epidemic of youth e-cigarette use” (here)
and a teen-vaping-related “epidemic of addiction.” He promised to use the FDA’s “civil and
criminal enforcement tools” to reign in e-cigarette marketers.
Dr. Gottlieb based his assessment on non-public data, but
publicly available data from the 2017 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) does
not show an epidemic.
The table at left displays the percentages of the estimated
14.9 million high school students who were “currently” using cigarettes and
e-cigarettes, by number of days in the past month. The numbers in each
box represent the percentages of all high school students. For example,
84.3% of students used neither product (bold
text, upper left).
Current users of e-cigarettes are in the red-bordered
boxes. The majority (60%) of current vapers used the products 5 or fewer
days (green text) – the equivalent of trying
products at a party. In contrast, a minority (20%) of vapers used them
20-30 days (red text), which is suggestive of
dependence. Half of those were
not using cigarettes (bold red text).
This means that in 2017, only 184,000 high schoolers (1.24% of 14.9 million)
constituted the FDA’s e-cigarette-addiction epidemic.
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