United States: If you were under the impression that federal regulations regarding the sale of tobacco products meant that your teen wouldn’t be able to easily make online purchases of vapes, new research shows otherwise, as reported by HealthDay.
In 2020, the ‘Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act’ prohibited the shipping of e-cigarettes and vaping products through the United States Postal Service and provided an ID check to accept orders for delivery of these products. Although people have been barred from buying sweetened tobacco products in eight states and nearly 400 cities or counties, loopholes exist for online purchasing, according to the study.
Study Findings
Writing for the study, to be released Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open, Dr. Soneji and his colleagues tried to purchase from 78 Web sites flavored nicotine vaping products for home delivery.
What did they discover?
We consistently observed that out of 105 deliveries, the delivery personnel had only scanned the receiver’s identification card once. Looking at delivery interaction, 78% of the products were delivered with no interaction with the delivery personnel, 16% interacted with delivery personnel but had no identification check, and 5.7% had their identification checked but were not scanned.
“These results demonstrated pervasive non-adherence to age verification, shipping, and flavored tobacco restrictions among online tobacco retailers,” the researchers wrote in their study. “Jurisdictions should consider whether to permit online tobacco sales and, if permitted, ensure that retail policies such as flavor restrictions unambiguously cover online sales.”
E-Cigarette Shipping Loopholes
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivered about 80% of the orders, according to the study.
“There is a federal law that very clearly states that USPS cannot be used to ship tobacco products, but it is clearly still being used frequently,” Harati said. “Health experts should advocate for more routine compliance assessments among online retailers to prevent youth access.“
In 2019, Congress passed new laws on tobacco, increasing the minimum purchasing age from 18 – 21 years and the new photo identification provisions for the purchase of tobacco products.
Challenges in Online Age Verification
Nevertheless, ‘age-gating technology on these websites do not work,’ Thomas Carr, director of national policy for the American Lung Association, said in an interview with CNN. Customers did not report truthful information when entering their ages, and it is quite simple to purchase tobacco products to be delivered to children. This is still the case even though more people are shifting to buying things online: “At a physical store, you have a clerk who could check ID and actually look at the person, which you cannot do online.”
Vaping products employ a liquid solution that has nicotine, an addictive substance in the human system. That makes those products hard to give up, not to mention when they are flavored fruit and known to target youths.
“Young people are particularly susceptible to the addictive properties of nicotine,” Harati explained. “Their brains are still developing and forming neural networks that regulate their emotions, and nicotine strongly impacts those networks.”
Calls for Stricter Enforcement
The U.S. FDA was encouraged to eliminate these internet loopholes in August by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Association(ALA), and numerous other health organizations, as reported by HealthDay.
“Prohibiting tobacco sales completely, or states putting some more restrictions on how the products are delivered to people, can help make e-cigarettes harder to purchase,” Carr said. “Reducing the attractiveness of the products can help, too.”
