Over 1 Million Youth Started Smoking Daily, Mostly e-Cigarettes: US Study

Nearly 2,300 adolescents and young adults became new tobacco smokers in the US over the period of 2017-2019 with the total number of users under 21 years of age vaping (using e-cigarettes) rising to over 1 million by 2019, accordingly to new published research.
Of these, 56.3 per cent used Juul products in particular, according to research by John Pierce of the University of California San Diego in La Jolla, and colleagues in the May 30, 2022 edition of the online journal Pediatrics. Researchers reported that 'JUUL Labs' disrupted the e-cigarette market when they introduced the first high nicotine e-cigarette, a sleek product with candy and fruit flavourings.

In 2017, there was a 40 per cent surge in e-cigarette sales in the United States, driven by the products of the 'JUUL Labs'. The US surgeon general labelled it an epidemic of youth vaping. The researchers show this was also accompanied by an increase in new daily tobacco use, with 64.6 per cent of new users occurring among youths aged 14 to 17.
"Our analysis translates to 2,284 new underaged daily tobacco users each day between 2017 and 2019. This rate of youth tobacco initiation has not been seen since the early 1990s, prior to the implementation of tobacco control measures," said co-author John P. Pierce, PhD, Distinguished Professor at the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center.
"Given the recent evidence of the potential health consequences of vaping flavoured e-cigarettes, this sharp rise among youth requires urgent public health attention and action."
Using data from the nationally representative Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) longitudinal study, undertaken by the National...