Turns out people want nicotine less when it’s not blue raspberry flavour.
With the scientific consensus on nicotine-containing vapes now firmly leaning in the ‘probably quite bad for you’ direction, the next hurdle to cover is: how do we rebottle this proverbial genie?
Turns out, e-cigarette lose their shine for teenagers pretty fast when they no longer taste good.
Technically speaking, Australia has already banned flavoured vapes.
Less technically speaking, they are still readily available on the black market and have been for years.
What is good to know, though, is that bans on exotic flavours do work.
A new study out of the United States compared teen vaping in high schools located in cities where the sale of flavoured vapes were banned to teen vaping in cities where flavoured vapes were allowed.
It collected data from the four years following the implementation of the local bans and involved more than 2.8 million middle and high school student vape users.
Results from the first few years were… less than encouraging. In fact, there was no statistical difference between vape use in areas with a ban on flavours and areas without a ban.
By year three, vape use amongst teenagers going to school in an area a local ban on flavours was just 1.9 percentage points lower than vape use amongst teenagers going to school in areas without a ban.
But at the fourth year post-ban implementation, that gap widened to 9.3 percentage points.
“The delayed effects observed in years 3 and 4 for [vapes] suggest that the impacts of local flavour ban policies may require multiple years to fully emerge,” the research, published in JAMA Health Forum, said.
“One possible explanation is that many jurisdictions have gradually strengthened their flavour ban policy over time, by expanding product definitions to include menthol or other flavoured products or by broadening enforcement.
“These incremental policy updates may help explain the delayed but growing effects observed in the third and fourth years after implementation.”
Given that Australia only toughened restrictions on flavoured vapes in mid-2024, the fact that the number of high schoolers huffing down clouds of Mango Tango and Minty Menthol has remained seemingly unchanged does seem slightly less bad.
It’s also worth noting that cigarette use was not affected by the flavoured vape ban in the US study; i.e. teens were not replacing their flavoured vapes with traditional cigarette smoking.
Big day for small wins.
Puff your Blue Razz Ice clouds toward Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au if you have a sweet story idea.
