LOS ANGELES — To prevent young people from becoming hooked on tobacco, Congress took two steps in 2020 to stop minors from impersonating adults to purchase e-cigarette products online: It banned e-cigarette web sites those delivering via the US Postal Service required the delivery service they used to confirm the recipient's ID.
The state of California added its own twist this yr, banning most flavored tobacco products. This ban didn’t specifically apply to online sales, but the town of San Diego is one among several local governments which have passed laws to shut potential loopholes.
Researchers at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos and Stanford decided to check how well these protections worked. If the ends in San Diego are any indication, they're hardly working.
The team lined up eight adult pairs in October 2023 to try to purchase flavored nicotine vaping products from 78 online retailers. Each team placed two an identical orders from each retailer, with one shopper ordering throughout the city of San Diego and the opposite ordering in a unique city in San Diego County. There are not any explicit restrictions on online delivery of flavored e-cigarettes. With each order, they asked for postal service delivery if it was offered.
Ideally, the researchers would have crossed out completely – not one of the 156 orders were delivered given the federal government's ban on the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, and positively none were delivered by the postal service. Otherwise, not less than shoppers in the town of San Diego would have been left empty-handed, considering the town has specifically banned online sales of flavored e-cigarettes.
And even when these measures failed, not less than each buyer's ID must have been checked upon delivery to make sure they weren’t minors.
The results of the study, published Monday within the Journal of the American Medical Assn. published online showed that greater than two-thirds of buyers successfully purchased flavored e-cigarettes, including nearly 70% of buyers in the town of San Diego – again, where such sales are specifically banned, the study said.
80% of successful deliveries were handled by the postal service, which mustn’t have carried any of them, the study says. Another 9% got here from services like UPS and FedEx, which have policies against delivering tobacco products.
Ultimately, 93% of deliveries were accomplished without attempting to confirm the client's age. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the products were delivered with none interaction between the client and the delivery person, in accordance with the study. And in just one case did the delivery person scan the client's ID, as required by federal law.
“These results demonstrated widespread noncompliance with age verification, shipping, and flavored tobacco restrictions among online tobacco retailers,” the study authors wrote.
The authors also admitted that they only examined sales in a single county. But this county has a number of the strictest anti-tobacco policies within the country.
Eric Leas, an assistant professor at UCSD and director of the Tobacco E-Commerce Lab, said in an announcement that online sales of e-cigarettes are the biggest and fastest-growing sector of the tobacco industry.
“There have long been monitoring systems in place to help enforce laws in brick-and-mortar stores, but we don't have a system in place for online retailers,” Leas said, adding, “The results of this study underscore the need for more oversight and enforcement from online tobacco retailers.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “No tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, adolescents, and young adults.”
The latest CDC and Food and Drug Administration survey found that while e-cigarettes remain the preferred type of tobacco use amongst minors, the variety of middle and highschool students who reported currently smoking e-cigarettes has increased is decreased sharply from 2023 to 2024.
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