Editorial: Trying and failing to make sense of a flavored nicotine ban

Banning flavored nicotine products may briefly feel good for Denver’s City Council members who are admirably trying to keep the addictive vape products out of teens’ hands, but the victory will be hollow.

Shutting down the roughly 50 vape shops in Denver won’t be the silver bullet that keeps the next generation of Coloradans from getting addicted to nicotine. It will, however, cost local small business owners their livelihoods and a few hundred employees their jobs. Worse, the ban will give Big Tobacco a pass on responsibility for the harm Juul and Vuse have caused with their misleading advertising and attempts to target America’s youth with their extremely popular tobacco-flavored vape devices.

We too support many laws to keep dangerous and addictive vape products away from kids. We supported raising the age limit to 21, increasing taxes on nicotine products, banning advertising that targets teens, and spending millions of dollars on cessation programs.

And those efforts have worked. In 2017, 27% of teens who took the Healthy Kids Survey reported vaping in the past 30 days. That number dropped to 8.7% in 2023. National and state-wide regulations of vape devices are working. The next step to keep kids from taking up vaping is an information campaign to tell teens and young adults that vaping is still harmful to their lungs and that long-term health impacts are still unknown.

And we do support the part of the proposed Denver City Ordinance that holds store owners accountable for selling to anyone under the age of 21.

Almost 49% of students said getting vape products would be “sort of easy or very easy” , which is more than the 31% who said it’d be easy or very easy to get cigarettes. An alarming 85% of the students who had ever tried to buy vaping or tobacco products in a store reported that they were not refused because of their age.

The city can and should pass the portion of the proposal that would increase enforcement, specifically targeting the holders of tobacco sales licenses. We think violators should be fined the first time they’re caught selling to an underage customer. A second violation within three years should lead to the retailer’s license being suspended.

There’s a hidden battle right now in the vape and e-cigarette world between Big Tobacco companies and small distributors. Altria and R.J. Reynolds dominate the non-flavored vape industry with their respective brands Juul and Vuse, while small vape shops offer flavored nicotine products known as juice and disposable e-cigarettes that are available at specialty stores, smoking stores and liquor stores.

The ban on flavored tobacco targets the latter, which are small businesses selling a product that is likely significantly less harmful than Camels and Marlboros.

Americans decided long ago that they would not ban tobacco products, which are still responsible for 480,000 deaths a year in the U.S. Instead we’ve nibbled around the edges of this deadly product with regulation and restriction. The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control have made it clear that they don’t know the long-term health impacts of vaping but that inhaling chemicals into your lungs, which can include heavy metals and other compounds, cannot be good for you. But the FDA recently approved menthol-flavored vape devices in part based on evidence that they are less harmful than menthol cigarettes.