During his 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump bragged that he "saved flavored vaping" during his first term and promised that he would "save vaping again." That promise was significant in light of the de facto ban that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had imposed on vaping products in flavors other than tobacco and menthol—a policy that rejects the varieties that former smokers overwhelmingly prefer. But recent comments by Marty Makary, the Trump-appointed FDA adminstrator, cast doubt on whether he is committed to following through on the president's commitment.
Testifying before a Senate appropriations committee last week, Makary hyped the threat posed by underage vaping, which is the rationale for the FDA's flavor restrictions. In comments he highlighted on his official X account, Makary averred that "there are high schools in America now where kids are saying half of the kids in high school are addicted to these vaping products." Whatever those students might be saying, that statement is hard to reconcile with the latest results from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), which is conducted each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the 2024 NYTS, 7.8 percent of high school students reported that they had used e-cigarettes during the previous 30 days. Yet Makary implied that 50 percent of students at certain high schools are "addicted to these vaping products," which is more than six times the nationwide prevalence of past-month use in the 2024 NYTS and about 22 times the rate of daily use (assuming 30 percent of past-month users were daily users, as in the 2023 survey).
