Many local jurisdictions have adopted laws banning the sale of flavored vaping products (i.e. vaping products with flavors other than tobacco). Additional cities, such as Cleveland, are considering whether to follow suit. The federal Food & Drug Administration has also refused to approve marketing applications for non-tobacco-flavored vaping products (aka ENDS or "electronic nicotine delivery systems").
All of these policies are largely justified on the grounds that non-tobacco flavors may appeal disproportionately to to non-smokers, and to youth in particular. The further concern is that once people start vaping, they may be more likely to end up smoking. Yet there has been little effort to study whether restricting access to flavored vaping products produces the desired policy outcomes, and little consideration by policy-makers about whether policies that make vaping less attractive increase smoking. This matters because, whatever the risks of vaping, the use of vaping products is far less dangerous than smoking.
Prior research has found that taxes and age-based restrictions on vaping products have the unintended consequence of increasing smoking rates. This suggests that vaping and smoking are economic substitutes, and that any policy that makes vaping marginally less attractive than smoking has the possibility of increasing smoking rates over what they would otherwise have been. As a consequence, it would be reasonable to suspect that vaping flavor bans might reduce the rate at which smokers switch to vaping and, even worse, could lead to increased smoking.
