Recently, the corporations that own a number of major broadcasting brands—including CNN, CBS, TNT, and TBS—have announced that they will no longer air advertisements for e-cigarettes because of the ongoing research into e-cigarette health problems.

This decision comes in response to the current investigation into vaping-related lung illnesses, which have recently affected hundreds of Americans, and caused seven deaths.

“The use of e-cigarettes by young people is a growing public health epidemic that must be addressed. That’s why we’re calling on media organizations to help us promote public health and reject any advertisements that market e-cigarette products to youth,” said Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA, the American Medical Association president.

They hope that more companies will join in to cut vaping ads, even after the lung illness outbreak dies down. “While we’re pleased to see some media companies denying e-cigarette product ads during the current lung illness outbreak, we also encourage them and others to extend bans on e-cigarette product ads beyond the outbreak to help stem the rising use of these products among youth,” Dr. Harris noted.

According to physicians, however, cessation of advertising is not enough. The AMA has long called for more stringent regulations of e-cigarette products, as many don’t realize the dangers of e-cigarettes and vape pens.

E-Cigarette Use

A rapidly growing number of young people are using e-cigarette products regularly, and this is in part due to the ads for e-cigarettes that they see regularly.

According to a 2018 report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, about 80 percent of middle– and high-school students in the U.S. had seen advertisements for e-cigarettes in 2016. The main avenues through which these students saw e-cigarette ads were, from highest to lowest: in retail stories (70 percent), on the internet or TV (40 percent), and in newspapers or magazines (25 percent).

A national survey published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that 40 percent of twelfth graders had vaped nicotine products, and 25.4 percent of them had vaped nicotine in the last month. These numbers have grown significantly in the last couple of years.

“Current efforts by the vaping industry, government agencies, and schools have thus far proved insufficient to stop the rapid spread of nicotine vaping among adolescents,” wrote the researchers behind the survey, who hailed from the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota. The city of San Francisco even went as far as to ban e-cigarettes.

“Of particular concern are the accompanying increases in the proportions of youth who are physically addicted to nicotine, an addiction that is very difficult to overcome once established,” they added.

Indeed, while e-cigarette products are often advertised as being a way to help people stop smoking cigarettes, these are often the ways that young people first begin smoking, and can lead to e-cigarette health problems, addiction, or even more dangerous habits. “Use of e-cigarettes, hookah, noncigarette combustible tobacco or smokeless tobacco by youth is associated with cigarette smoking one year later,” according to a 2018 AMA Council on Science and Public Health report.

Juul, the largest e-cigarette company in the United States—with 75 percent of the U.S. share—announced a $10 million TV advertising campaign this past January.

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This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.