Vaping by high school students has fallen this year, CDC says
Varieties of disposable flavored electronic cigarette devices.
Rebecca Blackwell / AP
Fewer high school students are vaping this year, according to a new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
In a survey, the CDC found that 10% of high school students said they had used electronic cigarettes in the previous month, down from 14% last year.
Use of any tobacco product — including cigarettes and cigars — also fell among high-schoolers, the report said.
Among middle school student, about 5% said they used e-cigarettes. That didn’t significantly change from last year’s survey.
This year’s survey involved more than 22,000 students who filled out an online questionnaire last spring. The agency considers the annual survey to be its best measure of youth smoking trends.
Why the drop among high-schoolers? Health officials said factors that could be helping include efforts to raise prices and limit sales to kids by raising the legal age to 21.
“It’s encouraging to see this substantial decrease in e-cigarette use among high schoolers within the past year, which is a win for public health,” said Brian King, the federal Food and Drug Administration’s tobacco center director.
The FDA has authorized a few tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes intended to help adult smokers cut back but has struggled to stop sales of illegal products.
Other key findings in the report:
- Among students who currently use e-cigarettes, about a quarter said they use them every day.
- About 1 in 10 middle and high school students — 2.8 million kids — said they recently had used a tobacco product.
- E-cigarettes were the most commonly used kind of tobacco product, and disposable ones were the most popular with teenagers.
- Nearly 90% of the students who vape used flavored products, with fruit and candy flavors topping the list.
In 2020, FDA regulators banned those teen-preferred flavors from reusable e-cigarettes like Juul and Vuse, which now are sold only in menthol and tobacco. But the flavor restriction didn’t apply to disposable products, and companies like Elf Bar and Esco Bar quickly stepped in to fill the gap.