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The tobacco industry is evolving quickly. New data yesterday from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show e-cigarette use among middle and high schoolers on a continued rapid decline. But regulators remain on high alert as sales of new products like oral nicotine pouches increase. NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Regulators credited their crackdown on e-cigarettes with reducing teen vaping. Half a million fewer teens used e-cigarettes in the past year, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey. More than a quarter of teens vaped just five years ago. Today, that rate is just below 6%. But if there's anything anti-tobacco advocates learned from the sudden surge in youth e-cigarette use about a decade ago, it's that new products can come out of nowhere and addict a generation seemingly overnight. Brian King, the director of the FDA Center for Tobacco Products, cited a new one of potential concern - nicotine pouches. While the number of young people using them didn't increase significantly last year, it's been on an uptick.
BRIAN KING: Our guard is up. We're aware of the reported growing sales trends for nicotine pouches, and we're closely monitoring the evolving tobacco product landscape for threats to public health, particularly when it comes to kids.
NOGUCHI: Pouches, like most modern tobacco products, no longer look or smell like the leafy, smoky tobacco of the past. Meghan Morean says the ones she bought in a Danish airport this summer look and smell like chewing gum.
MEGHAN MOREAN: They're, like, little, tiny pillows made of, like, this soft, fibrous material. The little pouches contain nicotine, salt and flavorant.
NOGUCHI: Morean, a tobacco and addiction research scientist at Yale, says they're undetectable. People can rest them between their gum and cheek, and they can be used where smoking or vaping isn't allowed - airlines, classrooms, offices. She says for many years, pouches were regarded as obscure, niche cousins of chewing tobacco, more unsavory than cool.
MOREAN: Pouches really hadn't been sort of, like, out and about in this public-facing way. They kind of were just, like, behind the counter at gas stations and stuff.
NOGUCHI: That changed as tobacco companies invested in pouches, and they gained a social media fan base, including from celebrities like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Of course, one big critical question is whether nicotine pouches might help people stop smoking. The FDA's Brian King says more research is needed.
KING: That's why it's critical to have additional data from actual population groups to help identify who is using it.
NOGUCHI: But Yolonda Richardson, CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, says the industry's own marketing betrays their intent. They emphasize fun, flavor and discretion.
YOLONDA RICHARDSON: We're very concerned that the industry continues to find new products, new ways to addict our kids and increasingly to do so in ways that become really inconspicuous to adults.
NOGUCHI: Megan Moran, a public health messaging expert at Johns Hopkins University, agrees.
MEGAN MORAN: When we think of these pouches as tobacco products, it kind of makes them, I think, seem a little bit dangerous and more dangerous than if they were seen as an energy drink, a gum or a mint - something like that that's not a tobacco product.
NOGUCHI: Moran says the marketing suggests these new nicotine products want to lose their association with smoking altogether.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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