Jon Healey | (TNS) Los Angeles Occasions
LOS ANGELES — To attempt to hold younger folks from turning into hooked on tobacco, Congress took two steps in 2020 to maintain minors from posing as adults to purchase vaping merchandise on-line: It barred e-cigarette websites from delivering via the U.S. Postal Service, and it required no matter supply service they did use to verify the recipient’s ID.
The state of California added its personal twist that yr, banning most flavored tobacco merchandise. That prohibition didn’t explicitly cowl on-line gross sales, however the metropolis of San Diego is one among plenty of native governments that adopted legal guidelines to eradicate any potential loophole.
Researchers at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos and Stanford determined to check how properly these protections have been working. If the leads to San Diego are any indication, they’re hardly working in any respect.
The workforce lined up eight pairs of adults to attempt to purchase flavored nicotine vaping merchandise from 78 on-line retailers in October 2023. Every workforce made two equivalent orders from every retailer, with one purchaser ordering from throughout the metropolis of San Diego and the opposite in a unique metropolis in San Diego County with no express restrictions on on-line supply of flavored vapes. In every order, they requested for supply by the Postal Service if it was provided.
Ideally, the researchers would have struck out utterly — not one of the 156 orders delivered, given the state’s ban on the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, and positively none delivered by the Postal Service. Failing that, at the least the purchasers throughout the metropolis of San Diego ought to have come up empty, contemplating the town’s express ban on on-line gross sales of flavored vapes.
And even when these measures failed, on the very least, every purchaser’s ID ought to have been checked upon supply to ensure they weren’t minors.
The outcomes of the examine, which have been printed on-line Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., confirmed that greater than two-thirds of the consumers efficiently obtained flavored vapes, together with nearly 70% of the consumers within the metropolis of San Diego — once more, the place these gross sales are explicitly prohibited, the examine mentioned.
Of the profitable deliveries, 80% have been dealt with by the Postal Service, which shouldn’t have carried any of them, the examine discovered. An extra 9% got here from providers resembling UPS and FedEx which have insurance policies towards delivering tobacco merchandise.
Lastly, 93% of the deliveries have been accomplished with no try and confirm the customer’s age. Within the overwhelming majority of instances, the merchandise have been dropped off with none interplay between the customer and the supply particular person, in keeping with the examine. And in just one case did the supply particular person scan the customer’s ID, as required by federal legislation.
“These results demonstrated pervasive nonadherence to age verification, shipping, and flavored tobacco restrictions among online tobacco retailers,” the examine’s authors wrote.
The authors additionally acknowledged that they examined gross sales in only one county. However that county has a number of the hardest anti-tobacco measures within the nation.
Eric Leas, an assistant professor at UCSD and director of the Tobacco E-commerce Lab, mentioned in a press release that on-line gross sales of e-cigarettes are the biggest and quickest rising sector of the tobacco trade.
“There are longstanding surveillance systems in place that help implement laws at brick-and-mortar stores, but we do not have a system in place for online retailers,” Leas mentioned, including, “The results of this study highlight the need for greater oversight and enforcement of online tobacco retailers.”
Representatives of the Vapor Know-how Assn., a commerce group for the e-cigarette trade, and Shopper Advocates for Smoke-free Alternate options Assn., which helps vaping, didn’t reply instantly to requests for remark Monday. Each teams have pushed towards bans on flavored e-cigarettes and have argued that vaping is a safer method to eat tobacco than cigarette smoking.
In response to the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, “No tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, teens, and young adults.”
The newest survey by the CDC and the Meals and Drug Administration discovered that though vaping stays the preferred type of tobacco use amongst minors, the variety of middle- and high-school college students who mentioned they have been presently vaping dropped sharply from 2023 to 2024.
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