Teens Find a Big Loophole in the New Flavored Vaping Ban (Published 2020) (2024)

The Food and Drug Administration is banning most flavored e-cigarettes, but that isn’t keeping banana ice, sour gummy or cool mint out of the hands of McCracken County High School students.

Blame a policy loophole. When the Trump administration decided to prohibit fruit, mint and dessert flavors in refillable cartridge-based e-cigarettes like Juul, it carved out a few exceptions to mollify the vape shop owners and adult consumers who complained. The much-publicized exemption allows menthol and tobacco flavors.

But a footnote on page 9 of the new policy permits all flavors to continue to be sold in devices that cannot be refilled and are designed to be disposed of after the flavored nicotine has run dry.

Teenagers have caught on fast.

“Students were telling me that everybody had gone to Puff Bars, which are disposable,” said Lauren W. Williams, a teacher at McCracken, near Paducah, Ky. “The one we confiscated here this week is Banana Ice. Students are not using Juuls anymore because no one wants menthol or tobacco.”

Juul Labs, the San Francisco-based company that dominates the e-cigarette market, has been widely blamed for igniting the youth vaping epidemic with its fashionable, sleek devices and flavors like mango, mint and creme. The company was feeling so much pressure it voluntarily discontinued all its flavors but menthol and tobacco last fall. But the holes in the government’s flavor ban have merely opened the door to an array of competing brands that produce disposables, like Puff Bars, blu, Posh and Stig. The pre-charged, pre-filled devices are made by domestic companies and imported from China. Some have a higher nicotine level than Juul.