The number of kids using e-cigarettes has fallen to a 10-year low, according to the federal 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey. Vaping among middle and high school students in 2024 has collapsed by 70 percent from its peak in 2019, with just 5.9 percent of students vaping at least once in the past 30 days, significantly lower than the use of either alcohol (22%) or cannabis (17%).
Youth vaping was declared an “epidemic” by former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Addams in 2018. Six years later, it’s clear the language of epidemics no longer accurately describes patterns of youth vaping, if it ever did.
Two questions arise from the rapid decline of youth vaping. First, what caused such a substantial fall in the number of kids experimenting with vaping? Second, how should policymakers, regulators, and commentators respond to this trend?
There’s no single answer as to why kids no longer find vaping as attractive as they once did. Critics of vaping are quick to point to the number of e-cigarettes the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has purged from the legal market and decisions in some states to ban flavored e-cigarettes outright.
These answers are hardly convincing. Since a handful of states and the FDA started cracking down on flavored e-cigarettes, a wave of single-use flavored vapes flooded in from China to replace products that were previously legal. Disposable flavored vapes, mostly sold in the gray and black market, now account for around 60 percent of all e-cigarette sales. The influx invited hearings in Congress and raised concerns about fly-by-night companies skirting FDA regulation.
But even as flavored vapes remain ubiquitous in most of the country, youth vaping continues to decline. A more likely explanation for the lack of youth interest in e-cigarettes is a combination of an increase in the tobacco age to 21, greater engagement among parents and educators to prevent their kids from vaping, and the reality that some teen trends fall out of fashion as quickly as they rise.
The youth vaping epidemic may be over, but smoking still causes hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, and while youth tobacco use should always be a concern for policymakers, when the facts change, policy should follow. In 2017, Georgetown University Medical Center estimated that 6.6 million premature deaths could be avoided if smokers switched to vaping. Seven years later, both federal and state governments have failed to maximize the public health gains that vaping offers.
Companies trying to get their vaping products authorized by the FDA and into the hands of adult smokers who want to quit face regulatory barriers so high that more than 99 percent of product applications submitted to the FDA have been rejected. Because of unclear public health messaging, most adults incorrectly believe vaping nicotine is just or more dangerous than smoking, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Legislators and the FDA should shift their focus from out-of-date narratives and misbegotten policy responses. Banning flavored e-cigarettes hands the market to bad actors, and higher e-cigarette taxes remove the incentive for adult smokers to switch to a safer product.
The FDA has belatedly recognized the problem of misperceptions of e-cigarettes and is currently investing resources to discover how best to communicate to adult smokers that not all nicotine products carry the same level of risk. But the slow pace of change and lack of interest in reforming the FDA’s regulatory processes means that many of more than 30 million adult smokers in the U.S. will continue to do so for longer than they otherwise would.
Youth vaping has declined at a steady clip since 2019. Still, many lawmakers, anti-vaping campaigners, and media outlets continue to frame vaping as a dangerous epidemic threatening America’s children, ignoring the benefits these products present to adult smokers trying to quit. The continuing panic over youth vaping is not cost-free.