The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wisely threatened Sept. 12 to ban the problematic Juul flavor pods unless Juul Labs could prove that it could keep its addictive products away from minors in 60 days. Additionally, the FDA performed a surprise inspection on Juul headquarters Sept. 28 and confiscated over a thousand documents.
No matter how the e-cigarette industry markets electronic tobacco pods as healthy alternatives to cigarettes, continued use of these products is extremely harmful. Studies by Stanford Medical School have revealed that the amount of nicotine in one Juul device equals that of a pack of 20 cigarettes.
Juul’s e-cigarettes are appallingly designed to target teenagers, advertising sweet flavors and emphasizing easy accessibility. Alarmingly, vaping devices are attracting teenagers who normally would not have smoked. According to the 2017 National Youth Tobacco Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), e-cigarettes have become the most popular tobacco product as usage rates have skyrocketed from 1.5 to 11.3 percent since 2011. Research has proven that nicotine intake at a young age could lead to lifelong dependency on lethal drugs such as cocaine. Juul’s devious marketing ploy ruins the lives of teenagers, whose adolescent brains are especially vulnerable to addiction. Because teenage vaping is becoming an increasingly serious problem, the government should ensure that Juul’s target audience shifts to an older demographic.
Juul must reduce the amount of advertisements it produces and enforce its age restriction more strictly. Currently, the age restriction for vaping, which is 21 in California, is ignored by most stores. When Dmitriy Nikitin, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, recruited three teenagers to purchase vaping products from various domestic online stores, all but four stores sold e-cigarettes despite the nationwide ban on teen access.
Although Juul is only one of many e-cigarette companies, fighting Juul can significantly reduce the industry’s influence as it controls 75 percent of the e-cigarette market. The FDA must perform more surprise warehouse inspections like the one on Sept. 28 and impose more restrictive regulations, such as lowering the maximum amount of nicotine allowed in one e-cigarette.
Ideally, the FDA should apply restrictive laws to the entire tobacco industry. In reality, tobacco is mixed into the roots of America, and it is unlikely to be easily flushed out. Knowing that the main cause of America’s obsession with smoking, which has evolved from the pipe to the cigarette and now to the e-cigarette, is the participation of the youth, the government must focus its efforts on preventing teenage tobacco use. Banning harmful Juul products is the first step.