Unicorn Vomit. Cotton Candy. Gummy Bear. Skittles.
Some teenagers who tried these playful vaping flavors thought they were just inhaling water vapor _ not also nicotine, a chemical considered as addictive as heroin and cocaine.
Now, as a mysterious vaping-related lung disease has doctors and parents urging the nation's 3.6 million young users to quit, many are finding that they physically can't _ they're hooked. It's exactly the kind of youth addiction crisis the Food and Drug Administration had warned of four years ago when it tried to ban flavored fluids for e-cigarettes.
If the FDA ban had gone through, the kid-friendly vaping liquids would have been pushed off store shelves.
Instead, over the course of 46 days, a deluge of more than 100 tobacco industry lobbyists and small-business advocates met with White House officials as they weighed whether to include the ban as part of a new tobacco control rule.
The end result: Senior Obama administration officials nixed the ban and much of the evidence supporting it, according to documents reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.
The officials told the Times that a cost-benefit analysis suggested the economic burden on vape shops appeared to outweigh potential health benefits of the ban.
After the rules took effect in 2016, sales for Juul, the most popular e-cigarettes, skyrocketed by more than sixfold, reversing decades of progress on youth smoking.
By 2018, about 4.9 million middle and high school students were using tobacco products, up from 3.6 million the prior year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Desmond Jenson, an attorney focused on tobacco policy at the Public Health Law Center, saw the decision as one that would lead to lifelong youth addiction and regret: "This was the moment we'd go back to in a time machine _ the moment we could have nipped this disaster in the bud."
