Youth e-cigarette use has declined nearly 70 percent since its peak in 2019, federal officials said Thursday, touting the new results of an annual government survey as progress in the fight against the popular products that have hooked adolescents on nicotine.
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The decline marks the lowest level of youth e-cigarette use in a decade, federal officials said, and was largely driven by a decrease in vaping among high school students. About 1.21 million high school students surveyed this year said they had used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days, compared with 1.56 million in 2023, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But among middle school students, there was not a statistically significant change in e-cigarette use within the past year, which experts said indicates the need to better tailor interventions to the students who are vaping.
Federal health officials say the drop in youth vaping comes as the government has ramped up enforcement efforts, levying fines against e-cigarette manufacturers and retailers for selling unauthorized vapes, as well as seizing illegal products from overseas. But they conceded that more work needs to be done to further reduce usage, particularly among middle-schoolers.
“This is certainly something to celebrate,” Joanna Cohen, director of the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in an email. “That being said, the nicotine and tobacco industry remains well-equipped to continue to hook our kids with its vast array of evolving flashy products and appealing flavors.”
Some experts attribute the steady decrease to new evidence that has emerged about the health risks of e-cigarettes. Other factors include efforts to prevent the sale of vapes that have not been authorized by the FDA and educational campaigns at the federal, state and local level, experts said.
Meanwhile, nicotine pouches, such as Zyn, have become increasingly popular, championed by social media influencers and conservative figures who extol their stimulating effects on the brain. Despite increased sales of nicotine pouches, usage levels among middle and high school students remained flat — under 2 percent — over the last year.
But experts worry that nicotine pouch usage may rise among youth, given the cultural buzz around Zyn and Philip Morris’s plans to build a factory in Colorado to meet new demand for the products.
“My guess is they are hard to find still. Particularly Zyn is not easy for kids to get, especially if adults are competing to find them,” said Kristoffer Inton, an analyst at Morningstar Research Services who follows the tobacco market.
Federal officials say they are closely monitoring the evolving tobacco landscape.
“Bottom line is that we are concerned about any tobacco product use that may appeal to youth,” said Brian King, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. “Our guard is up.”
The study’s findings come at a pivotal moment for federal tobacco-control efforts. The FDA faces increasing pressure to finish reviewing applications from companies seeking to market e-cigarette products. The agency in June approved the first menthol-flavored e-cigarettes — a decision that drew swift criticism from some public health advocates but also indicated the agency believes some vapes could benefit adults who want to quit smoking traditional cigarettes.
The vaping industry has cast e-cigarettes as less risky because they are not associated with the same risk of cancer and lung and heart disease as traditional cigarettes. Anti-tobacco advocates argue that nicotine in e-cigarettes harms the developing brains of young people who get addicted and often vape along with smoking traditional cigarettes.
“Today’s data from the FDA and CDC confirms once again that there is no youth vaping epidemic as the rate continues to plummet,” Tony Abboud, executive director of the Vapor Technology Association, a trade association representing e-cigarettes companies, said in a statement. “The FDA must stop shading the facts and start authorizing a wide variety of less harmful flavored e-cigarette options for the 30 million Americans suffering and dying from cigarette smoking.”
A major test of the agency’s power to regulate e-cigarettes is playing out in the courts. The Supreme Court has agreed to review in the coming term the FDA’s refusal to approve some flavored vapes. In January, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ordered the agency to reconsider its decision prohibiting two companies from marketing e-cigarette products with names such as “Iced Pineapple Express” and “Pink Lemonade” that critics say appeal to kids.
Last week, 11 public health, medical and community groups urged the Supreme Court to strike down the lower’s court decision, arguing that it “would leave more young people in the grip of nicotine addiction and exposed to the health harms of e-cigarettes.” In a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday, 16 Democratic lawmakers contended that Congress has empowered the agency to regulate e-cigarettes.
While experts lauded the decline in youth e-cigarette use as a sign of progress for public health, they cautioned that Thursday’s report does not include results across broader age groups.
“This is not the full story. This is not overall tobacco use,” said Mitch Zeller, former director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products.
The survey also reveals that disposable e-cigarettes are by far the most popular products among young people, Zeller noted. That is a preventable trend stemming from the Trump administration’s failure to regulate flavored one-time-use vapes as part of its crackdown on the e-cigarette industry, he said.
“We’re still paying the price for it today even with the overall decline in kids’ use in e-cigarettes,” Zeller said.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have accused the FDA of failing to curb flavored vaping products that enter the United States from China and are not authorized to be sold.
Researchers at the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies estimate that more than $1.6 billion dollars’ worth of illegal disposable vapes were sold in the United States last year.
An analysis of sales data and the FDA survey results suggest that the agency’s enforcement actions against unauthorized brands such as Elf Bar have resulted in lower youth usage, said Cristine Delnevo, the institute’s director. Among students who reported using e-cigarettes, the percent who used Elf Bar dropped from 56.7 percent in 2023 to 36.1 percent this year, according to survey results.
“However, the challenge is many products rebrand themselves to evade enforcement or are replaced by a competing illegal brand,” Delnevo said.
