Californians have an opportunity on Tuesday to protect the health of their children by voting yes on Proposition 31, which would be a vote to prohibit the sale of nearly all flavored tobacco products in the state. It’s a much-needed move, and one that every state in the nation should be taking.
Flavored e-cigarettes have addicted a new generation of Americans to nicotine. In the past decade, the use of flavored e-cigarettes and other electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) by youth and young adults, as well as by others who did not previously use tobacco products, has grown substantially, hitting a peak among high schoolers in 2019. Although use of these products dropped during the Covid-19 pandemic, their popularity is once again starting to rise. New data from the 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) show that more than 2.11 million high school students, or just over 14% of all high school students in the United States, now use ENDS — an increase of 24% since 2021.