Of every dollar Americans spent on e-cigarettes in convenience stores, grocery stores, and similar tracked retailers during December 2025, roughly 69 cents went to a product the Food and Drug Administration had never authorized for sale. Among sales of fruit, candy, sweet, and mint flavors, the authorized share was zero.
Those are the central findings of a report published in NEJM Evidence on August 11, 2026, by scientists at the CDC Foundation. It appears in the journal's Public Health Alerts section, produced in partnership with the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
The researchers examined retail scanner data licensed from the market research firm Circana covering the United States, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, for the four-week period ending December 28, 2025. They measured dollar share rather than units sold, because e-cigarette devices vary so widely in size and price that counting units produces a misleading picture.
What Unauthorized Means Standing in a Store Aisle
The word carries a specific legal meaning that gets lost in headlines about illegal vapes.
Under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, a manufacturer must receive a marketing authorization order from the FDA before legally marketing a new tobacco product in the United States. Obtaining one requires a determination that the product is appropriate for the protection of public health, weighing population-level risks and benefits, including the likelihood of initiation by young people.
A product without that order has not necessarily been tested and rejected. In most cases, it has not been evaluated at all. No federal reviewer has examined what is in the aerosol, what the device delivers, or how the flavor chemistry behaves when heated.
That is the practical meaning of the figure. It is a measure of regulatory blindness, not a measure of confirmed toxicity, and the distinction matters for interpreting the risk.
Tobacco Flavors Were Almost Entirely Authorized; Everything Sweet Was Not
The flavor breakdown is the most striking part of the analysis.
Among all tobacco-flavored e-cigarette sales in the study period, 93.1 percent were FDA authorized, accounting for 88 products. Among menthol-flavored sales, 26.1 percent were authorized, accounting for 28 products. For every other flavor category the researchers examined, including fruit, sweet, candy, and mint, no sales were authorized.
The reason is that the FDA has authorized e-cigarettes exclusively in tobacco and menthol flavors. Every fruit or dessert vape on a counter is therefore outside the system by definition. By product type, 97.6 percent of disposable e-cigarette sales were classified as unauthorized, compared with 50 percent of closed refill sales.
Overall, 146 products accounting for 30.6 percent of dollar sales matched authorized products, split between 22.5 percent for 116 exact matches and 8.1 percent for 30 probable matches. The remaining 69.4 percent of sales came from 4,421 distinct products classified as unauthorized. As of the study period, just 39 e-cigarette products held marketing-granted orders.
The authors wrote that "thousands of unauthorized e-cigarette products continue to be sold in the United States."
The Blind Spot in the Data Cuts Both Ways
Retail scanner data captures convenience stores, grocery stores, drug stores, retail chains, clubs, dollar stores, gas stations, mass merchandiser outlets, and military bases. It does not capture vape shops, tobacco specialty stores, or online sellers.
The authors are careful about what that means. Because those excluded channels have been found to sell unauthorized products, the analysis may overstate the share of sales that are legally marketed. At the same time, manufacturers can substantially relabel authorized products without notifying the public, so the matching process may also understate authorized sales. The full report calls for more complete data on products and sales in untracked channels to better inform monitoring and enforcement.
There is a second complication that runs counter to the intuition that retailers are simply flouting the law. The authors note that insufficient public data about which tobacco products are legally marketed presents compliance challenges for retailers and complicates research. A store owner trying to stock legally can consult the FDA's searchable tobacco products database, but matching the list to what a distributor delivers is not straightforward.
Who Is Actually Using These Products
The report cites 2024 figures showing current e-cigarette use among 7.0 percent of US adults, 14.8 percent of young adults aged 18 to 24, 7.8 percent of high school students, and 3.5 percent of middle school students.
The concentration among young adults is the number that gives the flavor its weight. The authors conclude that disposable e-cigarettes in flavors that may appeal to young people made up the majority of unauthorized sales, and youth and young adults are described as being at disproportionate risk for e-cigarette use, particularly disposable devices in non-tobacco flavors.
The summary of the findings does not present the estimate as a trend line, and comparing it against earlier analyses that used different matching methods would not be reliable. What it establishes is a snapshot: at the end of 2025, most of the money spent on e-cigarettes in tracked US retailers went to products no federal reviewer had cleared.
For consumers, the useful takeaway is narrow and factual. A flavored disposable vape purchased in the United States has almost certainly not been reviewed by any federal agency. That is not the same as a finding of harm, and people who want to stop using nicotine should talk with a clinician about approaches with an established evidence base.
Key Questions Answered
What does unauthorized mean in this context?
It means the product has no marketing authorization from the FDA. In most cases, that means the product was never evaluated, not that it was reviewed and rejected.
How much of the market was unauthorized?
Unauthorized products accounted for 69.4 percent of e-cigarette dollar sales in tracked retail channels during the four-week period ending December 28, 2025, covering 4,421 distinct products.
Are any flavored vapes legal?
Only tobacco and menthol. The FDA has issued marketing-granting orders exclusively for e-cigarettes in those two flavor categories, so no fruit, candy, sweet, or mint product in the analysis was authorized.
How many e-cigarette products are actually authorized?
Thirty-nine products held marketing-granted orders as of the study period. Because scanner data assigns multiple codes to the same product in different pack sizes, those 39 corresponded to 146 matched entries in the retail data.
Does the analysis cover vape shops and online sales?
No. The data come from convenience, grocery, drug, chain, club, and dollar stores, gas stations, mass merchandisers, and military bases. Vape shops, tobacco specialty stores and online retailers are excluded.
Does unauthorized mean unsafe?
Not necessarily. It means no federal reviewer has assessed the product. The finding describes a gap in oversight rather than a documented health effect for any specific device.
Who is most likely to use these products?
Citing 2024 data, the report notes e-cigarette use among 7.0 percent of adults, 14.8 percent of adults aged 18 to 24, 7.8 percent of high school students, and 3.5 percent of middle school students.
