Will Banning Flavord E-Cigs Do the Job?

• Position: SMOKING CESSATION

More than 2,000,000 teens in the U.S. use e-cigarettes, according to the 2021 National Youth Tobacco Survey. Most of them--nearly 85%--favor flavored products.

Anti-smoking groups say that flavors improve the taste of e-cigarettes, making it easier for youth to become addicted to the nicotine in them--and lawmakers in several states agree, banning the sale of e-cigarettes that come in flavors like candy, mint, and menthol.

In 2019, Massachusetts became the first state to restrict the sale of all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco. New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island banned the sale of flavored e-cigarettes in 2020. This year, California voters will decide whether to end the sale of flavored tobacco, including flavored vaping cartridges.

However, do these policies work? Do they decrease tobacco use among young people? Three researchers at Boston College have received a grant from the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) to study how state policies that restrict the sale of flavored tobacco products affect tobacco use among people 14 to 24.

Social epidemiologist Summer Sherburne Hawkins, economist Kit Baum, and developmental psychologist Rebekah Levine Coley are teaming up to analyze data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System, which capture the use of e-cigarettes among young people across the U.S. Over the past two years, a total of seven states have enacted temporary or permanent bans on flavored tobacco products.

"Differences in state tobacco control policies create a natural experiment, allowing us to evaluate their effects using these representative datasets," says Hawkins, associate professor in the College School of Social Work...