Health economists warned that taxes on e-cigarettes and vape products alone would not be enough to keep teenagers from using other risky tobacco products such as regular cigarettes.
“Our study is now part of a growing body of evidence that different types of policies designed to curb e-cigarette use, while they are generally effective in doing that, they have this unintended consequence of driving people back to a more harmful nicotine delivery system: traditional cigarettes,” said Charles Courtemanche, a health economist at the University of Kentucky and co-author of this month’s report on whether the United States should put a blanket tax on vaping products.
The authors reported that a tax on electronic nicotine delivery systems reduces the likelihood that the youth will buy the products in retail stores. However, hiking up the prices of vaping products runs the risk of pushing young people toward cheaper alternatives, such as regular cigarettes.
The economists behind the report used extensive data collection from two national studies — Monitoring the Future, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The significant increase in combustible cigarette use among teens suggests that the net public health effect may not be positive, and it might actually be negative,” said Mike Pesko, an economist at Georgia State University and a corresponding author of the report.
Increasing a tax on one nicotine product without doing so on another, such as traditional cigarettes, could inadvertently shift those teenage users to more risky smokable tobacco products. Research from Monitoring the Future, a large yearly survey of drug use among adolescents, showed that the increased cost of e-cigarettes affected how 2% of adolescents used them. However, the authors of the report pointed out that about 68% of that small fraction of teenagers had started substituting regular cigarettes.
Regulators will want to tread carefully when recommending certain stopgaps to keep vaping products away from minors at the risk of sacrificing years of declining smoking rates among adolescents. Teenage smoking rates have plummeted over the past decade, according to federal data. For example, nearly 5 out of every 100 high school students in the U.S. reported in 2020 that they smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days, down from 15.8% in 2011.
“The rise of e-cigarettes is probably the biggest explanation for that, so wouldn’t it stand to reason that if you sort of put vaping devices out of business that you would undo that trend?” Courtemanche added. “With all these types of tobacco products, you crack down on one, and another one pops up like a whack-a-mole game at the amusement park.”
To date, 29 states and the District of Columbia have levied excise taxes on vaping products as a way to discourage minors. Imposing a wide-reaching tax on vaping products such as Juul pods and e-cigarette devices has been floated as a remedy to the epidemic of teenagers becoming addicted to nicotine using those products, usually with flavors that appeal to children.
Former President Donald Trump aimed to take flavored vaping liquid off the market, but his administration’s efforts stalled in the months leading up to the onset of the worst pandemic in the U.S. in a century. The Trump administration also abandoned plans in 2019 to propose new regulations to decrease the nicotine content in cigarettes, with the goal of making tobacco less addictive.
The Food and Drug Administration under President Joe Biden has taken aim at the tobacco industry, having already proposed a ban on menthol-flavored cigarettes amid pressure from civil rights groups on regulators to crack down on the tobacco industry’s aggressive marketing that targeted black communities. However, the ban, which would not apply to e-cigarettes and vaping liquids, has not come to fruition and is likely to involve a lengthy rule-making process.
