As electronic cigarettes have proliferated and spawned a sub-culture of their own—vape shops, chai-latte flavored vaping fluid and even the “sport” of cloud chasing—few policies have seemed as intuitive as stopping children under 18 from buying them. As almost all e-cigarettes contain nicotine, they’re addictive. Because nicotine is a stimulant, vaping almost certainly has the potential to cause heart disease. E-cigarettes likely don’t cause cancer and lung disease (those come mostly from the burning that takes place in combustible cigarettes) but they certainly aren’t risk-free either. Since e-cigarettes are so new, finally, nobody can be certain about their long-term health impacts. Nonetheless, the policy of banning sales of e-cigarettes to children has support from anti-smoking groups, major tobacco companies, upstart vaping companies, vape-store owners and advocacy groups that speak for vapers. The only organized opposition to some state-level youth-sales bans has come, indeed, from anti-smoking groups that are suspicious of big tobacco’s support for them and want legislatures to pass other regulations or taxes at the same time.
That’s why it’s interesting and perhaps a bit distressing to note a new paper accepted by the Journal of Health Economics (but not yet formally published) and written by Yale University’s Abigail S. Friedman. The paper, dense with economic jargon and regression analysis, comes to a shocking conclusion: “bans on e-cigarette sales to minors yield a statistically significant 0.9 point increase in the recent smoking rate among 12 to 17 year olds.” The increase, she finds, is large enough to offset the overwhelming bulk of the decrease in youth smoking that has otherwise taken place. Friedman’s data, furthermore, stands up even when controlled for everything from smoking rates among 18-25 year olds to state cigarette taxes.
