Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/1079661
t m c » p u l s e | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 9 5 Juul claimed that its flavors, social media marketing and original ads from 2015 weren't intentionally designed to attract teenagers; how- ever, beginning in April 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) turned up the heat by placing Juul under federal investigation. Later that month, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that the agency had uncovered a litany of violations in e-cigarette sales to underage teen- agers and requested that Juul sub- mit company materials, including marketing documents and research targeting different age groups. In response, Juul said it would support raising the tobacco-buying age to 21 and invest $30 million over the next three years to fund indepen- dent research, education and com- munity outreach initiatives. In November 2018, the FDA announced new steps in response to the astronomical surge of e-cigarette use among teens. Stopping short of a full ban on most flavored e-cigarette sales in retail stores and gas stations across the country—an idea many health experts and parents supported— the agency decided instead to issue new rules that limit sales to age- restricted locations and require more robust age-verification processes for online purchases. "I think this is overdue," Morain said. "The challenge for regulation is that we're really trying to thread the needle and ensure youth aren't getting access to these products, while adult smokers who would use them to transition or ideally to quit altogether would still have access." At the end of 2018, Adams issued the Surgeon General's Advisory on E-Cigarette Use Among Youth, only the fourth Surgeon General's Advisory in the past 13 years. His announcement drew data from the Monitoring the Future survey, which reported a decrease in opioid and alcohol use among adolescents. E-cigarette use, in con- trast, surged to staggering propor- tions. The percentage of American high school seniors who said they vaped in the past year jumped from 27.8 percent in 2017 to 37.3 percent in 2018. The percentage of high school seniors who vaped nicotine within a month before the survey nearly doubled, soaring from 11 per- cent in 2017 to 20.9 percent in 2018. "The meteoric rise in the use of e-cigarettes among our young peo- ple," Adams said, "rose to the level that I felt that I had no choice but to declare it an epidemic.