A New Policy Agenda for Electronic Cigarettes in the US: Preventing Youth Uptake While Still Increasing Adult Smoking Cessation - How To Accomplish Both
The use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) in the U.S. has created a public health concern revolving around youth uptake of e-cigarettes (which are nicotine-containing). Meanwhile, e-cigarettes are also used for adult smoking cessation which subsequently reduces an enormous burden of disease. This is where policy initiative gets tricky. For example, there is widespread consensus that adolescents should not use any form of nicotine and yet e-cigarettes come in “kid-friendly flavors”. An immediate policy idea would be to ban flavors and yet studies show that flavored e-cigarettes are more likely than unflavored e-cigarettes to encourage adult smoking cessation. This is just one example of how convoluted this topic can be.
That said, research conducted by HMP Governance Lab collaborators Dr. Alex Liber (a University of Michigan Ph.D. grad & Professor at Georgetown University) and Karalyn Kiessling (a University of Michigan Ph.D. candidate) along with co-authors; Dr. Kenneth Warner (a University of Michigan School of Public Health Professor & Dean Emeritus of Public Health) and Esquire Clifford Douglas (a University of Michigan School of Public Health Professor & Director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network) has revealed that the balance between preventing youth uptake of e-cigarettes while also offering e-cigarette use as a means for increasing adult cigarette smoking cessation is a challenge which can be tackled through a new policy approach.
Warner, Kiessling, Douglas, and Liber in their recent publication in Health Affairs, titled A Proposed Policy Agenda For Electronic Cigarettes In The US: Product, Price, Place, And Promotion, created a new policy agenda for effective intervention via the application of the ‘four Ps’ of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Their policy agenda, verbatim, includes: decreasing the addictiveness of combusted tobacco products while ensuring the availability of consumer-acceptable reduced-risk nicotine products, imposing large taxes on combustible products and smaller taxes on e-cigarettes, limiting the sale of all tobacco and (nonmedicinal) nicotine products to adult-only retailers, and developing communications that accurately portray e-cigarettes’ risks to youth and benefits for inveterate adult smokers.
Through new policy agendas which address core and systemic changes, such as the one proposed by Warner, Kiessling, Douglas, and Liber, and continued collaboration/support of new policy innovation in the public health domain, hopefully a future free of tobacco-related disease is possible. However, as of now, there is still much policy work that needs to be done in order to make this possible.
