US: E-Cigarette Controls Increase Teen Smoking Rates

Source from:  myinforms.com 11/05/2015

Banning the sale of e-cigarettes to minors has the counterintuitive effect of increasing rates of conventional smoking among this vulnerable age group, the results of an analysis of states with and without bans reveal.

Abigail Sarah Friedman, PhD, assistant professor of public health, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, and colleagues found that banning e-cigarette sales to people younger than 18 years increased smoking rates by 0.9% among 12- to 17-year-olds.

"Conventional cigarette use has been falling somewhat steadily among this age group since the start of the 21st century. This paper shows that bans on e-cigarette sales to minors appear to have slowed this decline by about 70% in the states that implemented them," Dr Friedman said in a release.

"In other words, as a result of these bans, more teenagers are using conventional cigarettes than otherwise would have done so. Policy makers have been assuming that banning e-cigarette sales to minors will improve public health," she added.

"This paper's finding, that these bans increase conventional cigarette smoking among teens, suggests that we may need to rethink this conclusion."

The research was published online October 19 in the Journal of Health Economics.

Sanctioning Teen Vaping?

To determine the impact of banning e-cigarettes on teen smoking rates, the team chose January 1, 2014, as a cutoff date, because 24 states had banned the sale of cigarettes to minors by then.

Using 2-year average smoking rates from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the researchers found that between 2002/3 and 2012/13, recent (within 30 days) smoking fell from 13.5% to 6.7% among 12- to 17-year-olds and from 42.1% to 32.8% among people aged 18 to 25 years.

Analysis of recent smoking indicated that there were no significant differences in smoking rates among 12- to 17-year-olds in states that would and would not go on to ban e-cigarette sales to minors.

This observation held after controlling for state demographics, state cigarette tax rates, and indicators for smoke-free air laws and medical marijuana legalization, as well as for smoking rates among 18- to 25-year-olds.

However, regressions comparing states with and without bans on e-cigarette sales to minors revealed that states that introduced bans experienced a subsequent positive and significant 0.7% rise in recent smoking among 12- to 17-year-olds.

Increasing the period of interest to 2 years to take into account the time when the bans were introduced led to even larger effects, at a relative 0.9% increase in smoking rates in states with e-cigarette bans.

The team calculates that this countered 70% of the decline in smoking that would have been expected during the same period had the ban not been introduced.

The findings, coupled with the assumption that e-cigarettes are less risky to health than traditional cigarettes, raises a question concerning the wisdom of banning e-cigarette sales to minors, the researchers write.

However, they note that this does not represent a "straightforward guide to regulation." Enditem