Pallone is right: Government must lead the fight against teen vaping

There are kids smoking e-cigarettes in your local middle school and high school today, perhaps dozens of them, and many have even mastered the trick of doing it during class without being detected.

It involves a $50 device not much larger than a USB thumb drive known as a JUUL, which they can pull out for a brain-twerking nicotine rush when the teacher's head is turned, and detection is hard because the odorless vapor dissipates almost as quickly as it takes to exhale.

It's a national rage, just ask your teen about it. The device is paired with a "pod" containing flavored vape fluid – they number in the thousands, with names such as Banana Smash and Cool Cucumber — and since it is largely unregulated by the FDA, you can guess where the market is going.

In 2018, 1.5 million more students overall used e-cigarettes than in 2017 – that's a 78-percent increase among high-schoolers and a 50-percent increase among middle-schoolers. The CDC says that 1 in 5 high school students (20.8 percent) and 1 in 20 middle school students (4.5 percent) have used electronic cigarettes in the last 30 days – which means they probably use a JUUL, a $40 billion monster that dominates 75 percent of the vaping market by hiding its smarmy Big Tobacco business modelbehind a Silicon Valley veneer.

We shouldn't be surprised. JUUL began marketing on social media in 2014, using images of happy Millennials sucking down nicotine in cool settings on Instagram and YouTube, and by the time the FDA caught onJUUL had already hooked a new generation of addicts.

"We were asleep at the switch," says Matt Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. "By the time we woke up, we had an epidemic on our hands."

So Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th Dist.) has jumped into this with both feet.

The chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee will introduce a bill Monday that slams the tobacco and vaping industries — by boosting FDA regulations, raising the age for all tobacco products to 21, prohibiting flavors (even menthol), setting new ad restrictions, limiting sales to in-person transactions, and much more.

Not all of these ideas will fly, but even Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) – who comes from the No. 2 tobacco-producing state — called for a 21-year-old minimum last week, citing the vape craze. That's the logical place to start: Nine out of 10 adult smokers start smoking by 18, so the goal must be to prevent teens from developing a nicotine dependency.

No doubt, E-cigarettes can play a role in a harm-reduction strategy for long-time smokers. Even the FDA admits that vaping could help wean adult smokers off combustible cigarettes, which have more 7,000 toxic chemicals. If you can deliver nicotine in an aerosolized form while eliminating carcinogens, it beats the alternative.

Still, claims of "safe" or "low risk" vaping are unsubstantiated, so the FDA has warned the industry that it will yank flavored products off the market if it does not address the surge in use among this new generation of nicotine addicts.

And there are two studies – from the Rand Corporation and from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine – that found adolescents who vape are more likely to smoke regular cigarettes and more likely to increase their use of both products over time.

One unsettling development is that FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb — who once sat on the board of a vaping company — gave e-cigarette manufacturers until 2022 to undergo a review of their products' impact on public health, including whether they appeal to kids.

We know that answer in New Jersey, one of 12 states that have raised the legal age to 21. In our state, 3,000 kids under 18 will become daily smokers this year. And nearly 150,000 of them will die prematurely from tobacco use.

So we applaud Pallone for trying to move the game, and to give Gottliebmore regulatory clout. Let's hope he uses it.