Teen Vaping Outside the United States: Does It Really Exist?

In the United States, the biggest reason why vaping is such a controversial topic is because teen usage of e-cigarettes in the U.S. has become a real problem. Although the number of teens who vape regularly in the U.S. dropped by 1.8 million between 2019 and 2020, the most recent survey results suggest that 3.6 million U.S. teens still vape. That’s a very significant number, and it’s one that lawmakers around the world regularly cite when discussing the need to “get tough on vaping” – so tough, in fact, that e-cigarettes are actually more difficult to buy than tobacco cigarettes in some parts of the world.

Is getting tough on vaping actually the right regulatory path to take? How did teen vaping become a problem in the United States, and does the problem actually exist elsewhere? Those are the questions that this article will explore.

Why Did Teen Vaping Become a Problem in the United States?

To understand why teen vaping is a problem that’s mostly exclusive to the United States, we need to understand the combination of factors that occurred there and haven’t occurred elsewhere.

The teen vaping epidemic in the United States centres around the JUUL brand. In short, the factors that combined to cause the proliferation of teen vaping in the United States were:

• JUUL was a product created by PAX Labs, one of the world’s most popular makers of herbal vaporizers. Since PAX already had a foothold in the industry – and because the company obtained a patent for its nicotine salt formulation – PAX raised $46.7 million in funding for the launch of JUUL in 2015. Even today, raising that kind of money would be nearly impossible for most vaping brands.
• PAX Labs used that funding to pay for the biggest launch of a vaping product that the world has ever seen. JUUL held lavish launch parties in trendy locales and hired young models to appear in marketing materials. JUUL also struck up relationships with social media influencers, many of whom had very young followers. Stanford University researched the marketing tactics used during the launch of JUUL and found the JUUL launch to be “patently youth oriented.”
• JUUL launched with just one nicotine strength: an extremely high 59 mg/ml. The addictive potential of JUUL is, therefore, nearly as high as that of tobacco cigarettes. Non-users of nicotine who try JUUL can potentially become addicted very quickly.
• Though it was evident that the JUUL brand was driving the teen vaping crisis, the U.S. government didn’t do anything to alleviate the issue until finally banning flavoured vape pods at the beginning of 2020. The government’s response to teen vaping was too late, and it didn’t address the real cause of the problem.

The U.S. government has the power to remove any vaping product from the market and could have banned JUUL – or all pre-filled pod-based vaping devices – when it became obvious that those products were irresistible to teens and that age verification measures weren’t preventing teens from buying them. Instead, the government told JUUL to fix the problem. That obviously didn’t happen.

Is Teen Vaping a Problem Elsewhere in the World?

Teen vaping as a problem of epidemic proportions is something that only exists in the United States – and the interesting thing about the problem is that, when talking about teen vaping, U.S. government and health officials have consistently blamed sweet flavours as the reason for the problem.

They have it completely wrong.

Flavours have very little to do with teen vaping, and a flavour ban is always the wrong way to prevent teens from wanting to buy e-cigarettes.

Sweet e-liquid flavours are available everywhere. If flavours make teens want to vape, one would naturally conclude that other nations must be dealing with teen vaping problems of their own. That, however, is not the case.

• United Kingdom: A 2019 survey found that 1.6 percent of teens in the U.K. were regular vapers. In comparison, 19.6 percent of high school students – and 4.7 percent of middle school students – in the United States are regular vapers. In the U.K. survey, every daily vaper reported having smoked cigarettes on at least one occasion, and a large percentage of U.K. teen vapers were, in fact, vaping because they wanted to quit smoking.
• Australia: Statistics released by the University of Queensland suggest that that the vaping rate among Australian students aged 14-17 is 1.8 percent. That figure includes students who vape daily, weekly, monthly and less than monthly. Of those who reported current vaping, 93.9 percent had smoked at least one cigarette before vaping for the first time. Most of Australia’s very low population of teen vapers, therefore, have already experimented with tobacco and are potentially trying to quit smoking.
• New Zealand: According to a report released by the University of Otago in 2019, the prevalence of regular teen vaping in New Zealand is 1.8 percent. Similar to the figures reported in the United Kingdom and Australia, only 0.4 percent of teens in New Zealand who have never smoked are regular vapers. Once again, the statics suggest that the vast majority of the teens who vape in New Zealand would otherwise be smokers or are using vaping to quit smoking.

In short, teen vaping essentially doesn’t exist outside the United States in significant numbers except among teens who have already experimented with nicotine and are either trying to quit or to reduce harm. In addressing this issue, governments should be looking at the underlying causes of teen smoking. Any reduction in teen smoking rates will also lead to a reduction in teen vaping rates.

Why Hasn’t Teen Vaping Become a Problem Outside the United States?

So, teen vaping essentially doesn’t exist elsewhere to the extent that it does in the United States. The reasons why teen vaping hasn’t occurred elsewhere in the world are essentially the opposite of why it has occurred in the U.S.

• JUUL’s youth-oriented product launch in the United States was something that could only ever happen once. JUUL – and other vaping brands – are watched much more closely now. If a vaping brand were to hire an army of young models and social media influencers as ambassadors today, people would surely notice and cry foul. We’ve now seen what happens when a vaping company employs those marketing tactics.
• The JUUL brand isn’t available in many markets outside the U.S. Where it is available, it isn’t particularly successful. After seeing the issues that JUUL has caused in the U.S., people in other nations have been reluctant to allow the brand to enter and gain a foothold in those markets.
• The governments of New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom have all established clear top-down messaging about who should buy e-cigarettes and what their intended use is. Although those three nations differ greatly in their approaches to vaping, they are all consistent in that they lack the wait-and-see approach that allowed JUUL to become a hip fashion accessory among U.S. teens.
• A restriction on the nicotine strength of e-liquid in the United Kingdom and Europe has prevented JUUL – and all other e-cigarette brands – from having the ability to cause almost instant addiction. In nations where nicotine strength restrictions exist, teens who experiment casually with e-cigarettes generally don’t become addicted and don’t continue vaping.