Surgeon General Jerome Adams took aim at the popular e-cigarette Juul on Tuesday, warning the public that vaping could lead to lifelong addiction, harm brain development, and damage the lungs.
“We need to protect our kids from all tobacco products, including all shapes and sizes of e-cigarettes,” Adams said in an advisory. “Everyone can play an important role in protecting our nation’s young people from the risks of e-cigarettes.”
Juul, which controls 70 percent of the vaping market, is shaped to look like a USB flash drive and has become popular among teens. Adams said a typical cartridge, known as a “pod,” has roughly the same amount of nicotine as a pack of cigarettes.
The advisory came on the heels of a survey on teen use issued Monday that suggested 1.3 million more teens had tried e-cigarettes in 2018 compared with 2017.
“In the data sets we use, we have never seen use of any substance by America’s young people rise as rapidly as e-cigarette use is rising,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement.
He said he worried vaping would cause teens to turn to traditional cigarettes, which are still the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.
More teens are using e-cigarettes even as the Food and Drug Administration cracks down on e-cigarettes. Scott Gottlieb, who oversees the FDA, has rolled out a series of proposals intended to curb teen vaping, including limiting access to flavored products.
Vaping opponents, including members of the public health sector, have long charged that e-cigarettes target teens because they come in multiple flavors intended to mimic fruits or desserts. The FDA plans to ban the sale of certain flavored e-cigarettes in convenience stores and gas stations. This would mean that certain flavors can be sold only in specialty vaping shops. The FDA will also require age verifications on websites where the devices are sold.
Juul, a start-up based in San Francisco, has closed its social media accounts and now only sells its flavored pods online with age verifications.
Critics of FDA proposals worry that making e-cigarettes less available will cause people to turn back to traditional cigarettes, reversing a major public health strides that have yielded record low smoking rates.
[Previous coverage: Juul to halt flavored e-cigarette sales to more than 90,000 stores as federal crackdown looms]
