A New Generation of Youth are Getting Addicted to Nicotine Through Vaping? FAKE NEWS

According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, "E-cigarettes are hooking a new generation on nicotine – putting millions of kids at risk and threatening decades of progress in reducing youth tobacco use. It’s a nationwide crisis of youth addiction, fueled by thousands of kid-friendly flavors and massive doses of nicotine."

It's a great and truly alarming sound bite, but is it true?

An examination of data from the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey shows that the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids' claim is alarmist propaganda that is false and misleading as well as obscuring the real threats to public health posed by actual tobacco-containing products as well as the real risks associated with youth vaping itself.

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Let's look at how bad this "crisis" of youth addiction is. A good sign of addiction to nicotine in vapes is the daily use of e-cigarettes. The prevalence of daily vaping among middle and high school students in 2024 was just 1.4%. This means that youth vaping ranks equal to or below all of the following other forms of substance use which are arguably more dangerous:

Smoking: 1.4%; 

THC vaping: 4.2%

THC vaping or smoking: 4.9%

However, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids is not saying anything about the problems of youth smoking or THC vaping.

In fact, if you exclude youths who are vaping THC and/or smoking, the prevalence of exclusive, daily e-cigarette vaping is only 0.5%.

By no means am I arguing that we don't need to address nicotine vaping among this 0.5% of youths. However, this can hardly be called an epidemic, there are clearly more dangerous substances being used by many more youth that need to be addressed, and in no way does this negate the drastic declines in youth smoking that have been achieved over the past several decades.

Moreover, even if vaping were sky-rocketing--like it did in 2019--it would still not be threatening our progress in reducing the use of tobacco among youth, as the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids claims. Why? Because nicotine vapes do not contain tobacco. Vaping is not a form of tobacco use, period. Even if every youth was vaping, it would not be a crisis of tobacco use. It would be a crisis of vaping.

Perhaps most importantly, the obsession that the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids has with hyperbolizing what is a real problem of youth vaping is damaging because it obscures attention from high risk behaviors that youth are engaging in but health groups are doing very little about: (1) smoking; and (2) THC vaping. This is not to mention the use of alcohol (10.4% past-month use among 10th graders in 2025) and other illicit drugs (11.3% past-month use among 10th graders in 2023). 

I understand the desire for groups like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids to ignore the actual data and mislead the public in order to scare them into thinking that youth addiction to nicotine is running rampant because of tobacco company marketing of e-cigarettes to minors and that a new generation of youth is becoming addicted to tobacco. That strategy makes sense because it is alarming and will bring in donations. However, in public health, we should pride ourselves on being honest, transparent, and evidence-based. And the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (along with many other tobacco control groups) is not doing any of these three.