Pennsylvania Raises Smoking Age To 21

It's official, Pennsylvania just raised the legal age limit for tobacco products from 18 to 21, effective July 1, 2020, making them the 19th state (and counting) to do so.  And the new law also expands the legal definition of tobacco products to include vaping products as well, since apparently they didn't even have an age limit for vaping products at all (though the federal age limit of 18 applied by default from 2016 onwards).

The part about including nicotine vapes in the definition of tobacco products is totally reasonable.  But raising the age limit to 21 is really not justified at all.  And Pennsylvania had been seeing so much progress in reducing teen smoking and vaping already, mainly due to tax hikes on both.  It would really be a shame to risk derailing such progress now with such an utterly illiberal and ageist law.

Yes, there is an exception in the new law for active military and veterans, who only need to be 18 or older instead of 21 to buy tobacco products.  But that one silver lining does still not make it OK to deny adult rights to otherwise legal adults over 18 who are legally old enough to join the military, regardless of whether they are actually in the military or not.  Thus, the exception does not actually resolve the inherent ageism and hypocrisy of this otherwise bad law.

I like to joke about "the other Tri-State Area", where NY, NJ, and PA all meet.  Port Jervis, NY, Montague, NJ, and Matamoras, PA are all right next to each other, and Matamoras is basically "come for the fireworks, stay for the cigarettes", since fireworks are legal in PA to sell to nonresidents, cigarettes are cheaper in PA, and the age limit in PA for tobacco has been 18 (until July 2020) while it is 21 in NY and NJ.  Looks like the tobacco part of that equation will no longer be true, at least the age limit part, and the price difference is also narrower now for cigarettes, and reversed for vape products, due to the tax hikes.  And gas is also more expensive now in PA than either of the other two states, while NJ gas is almost as pricey as NY now.  Thus the whole microeconomic dynamics of "the other Tri-State Area" are fundamentally different now, except for the fireworks of course.

Finally, Some "Reefer Sanity" In The Vaping Debate

It seems that at least some pundits, politicians, and public health officials are just starting to catch up with reality.  There is rapidly mounting evidence now that the primary culprit in the mystery vaping illness (that has killed over 40 people and sickened at least 2000 in the USA as of November 15, 2019) is the thickener additive Vitamin E Acetate in mostly black-market or counterfeit THC cartridges. This "thick and greasy" oil is harmless when used topically or ingested orally, but when inhaled it is apparently VERY bad for your lungs, much like any other "thick and greasy" oil would logically be.  And finally, several cannabis legalization and even medicalization states are belatedly banning or trying to ban its use in both legal and illegal THC cartridges, since until now almost no state banned or restricted this additive.

Better late than never, but honestly, what the hell took them so long?

THIS is what more states need to be doing.  Legalize cannabis, keep vaping legal in general, but regulate better and root out any bad actors in the legitimate market, while cracking down on any remaining illicit market that continues to hawk questionable wares.  In contrast, broad vaping or flavor bans, as well as cannabis prohibition and/or age limits set higher than 18, will only drive more customers to the black market, essentially pouring gasoline on the fire.  And those who foolishly opted for the later strategy while dithering over the real cause now have the blood of over 2000 Americans on their hands.

Of course, Vitamin E Acetate may not be the only culprit.  Other additives may also be to blame, as can perhaps the toxic cadmium fumes from cheaply-made and janky vaping devices and cartridges often made overseas (which can also be true for counterfeit nicotine vapes too, by the way).  And possibly pesticide contamination as well.  But again, in any case regulation would still work far better than prohibition to really get to the root of the problem.

As for the youth vaping epidemic driven by nicotine vapes, which is often disingenuously conflated with the mystery vaping illness, the best way to quash that is to raise the tax on nicotine-containing vape products, cap and phase-down the nicotine content of vape products down to European and Israeli levels, strictly enforce the existing age limit of 18 on vendors rather than raise it to 21, restrict vape advertising to be similar to the way it currently is for combustible tobacco products, and stop hyping this ridiculous moral panic so damn much for once.

So what are we waiting for? 

It's Not Just JUUL: The (Un-)American Vaping Association (And Trump) Also Throws Young Adults Under The Bus

As Trump announced the other day that his administration is looking at, among other things, raising the federal age limit for vaping products from 18 to 21 (which would require an act of Congress), the president of the American Vaping Association, Gregory Conley announced that he (and by extension, his trade group) openly supported the move as an alternative to prohibition.  Such a stance of regulatory appeasement by throwing 18-20 year old young adults under the bus to protect the vaping industry is cowardly at best, and will ultimately backfire as well.

And it is also all the more nonsensical given how the mysterious vaping lung illness that is sweeping the nation is driven primarily by black-market or counterfeit THC cartridges, not legal and legitimate nicotine vapes, and literally on the same day it was announced that they found further confirmatory evidence that the additive Vitamin E Acetate in the rogue THC cartridges is most likely the main culprit in causing this illness.  It is basically a thick, greasy oil that was NEVER meant to be inhaled, and can cause lipoid pneumonia when one does so.  Though likely other additives or contaminants could be causing it as well, such as cadmium fumes from the jankier vape devices themselves, since not all cases are consistent with lipoid pneumonia, and may be cadmium pneumonitis or metal fume fever instead.  And the Trump trade war with China may have led companies to shift to the use of cheaper and lower-quality devices and cartridges from 2018 onwards, ironically.

Thus, we at Twenty-One Debunked hereby excommunicate the American Vaping Association, just as we already did with the quislings at JUUL Labs.  And we can also add Trump 45 to the list as well now.  May their names and memory be forever blotted out.

The Needham, Massachusetts "Miracle", Debunked

Remember when Needham, Massachusetts made history in 2005 by being the first place in the USA to raise the age limit for tobacco to 21 in modern times?  And how the propoents of Tobacco 21 laws used them as an example of how successful such laws supposedly are at reducing teen smoking?  Well, a new article came out that thoroughly debunks that claim.  Scratch that, it debones, slices, dices, and juliennes it, and lays waste to its remains for good.

From 2006 to 2010 (the original study curiously did not include data before 2006), Needham did indeed see a faster drop in smoking rates among high school students compared to surrounding communities which kept the age limit at 18.  But from 2010 to 2012, the reverse was true: surrounding communities that kept it at 18 began to see faster declines in teen smoking rates than Needham.  This inconvenient fact was acknowledged buried in the original study (that went up to 2012) used to sing the praises of Tobacco 21, so it was not simply an oversight by the authors.  And according to the publicly available data that can be gleaned from schools in the surrounding communities, by 2014 the pattern reversed entirely, with the neighboring towns seeing larger net declines in teen smoking (59 to 77% drop) than Needham (40% drop) since 2006.  Hardly miraculous.  And by 2016, we see that some of these other towns raised the tobacco age limit to 21, but without seeing any further decrease in teen smoking (in fact, they saw a slight increase from 2014 to 2016).  If that's "success", we'd really hate to see what failure looks like.

So what explains the short-term success in the first few years in Needham?  Well, it could simply be have been a real but short-lived (and hollow) effect of the policy, just as Miron and Tetelbaum (2009) saw with the 21 drinking age versus traffic fatalities in the 1980s, with the effect being fairly small, dissipating after the first year or two before rebounding later, and further limited to the early-adopting states only (while in the later-adopting, coerced states, it actually had a perverse effect, or at best no effect).  But Needham also increased their enforcement on vendors dramatically, and also had at least some other tobacco laws that surrounding communities lacked.  And the percentage of smokers under 18 who bought their own cigarettes from stores also declined in Needham but not in the other neighboring towns.

Thus, it is very likely that the early decline in teen smoking would have been just as large if not larger had they simply kept the age limit at 18 but stepped up enforcement all the same, ceteris paribus.

Indeed, one should note that Woodridge, Illinois saw a similarly large drop in teen smoking in an even shorter timeframe (just two years) from 1989 to 1991 while keeping the smoking age at 18.  Leominster, MA also saw a drop almost as large from 1989 to 1991 as well.  And NYC, who raised their age limit from 18 to 21 (with no grandfather clause) in 2014, did NOT see teen smoking rates drop any faster than in the nation as a whole from 2013 to 2015.  Thus, the most parsimonious explanation is that Needham's (short) success story was primarily (if not entirely) due to increased vendor enforcement interacting with secular trends, and not the raising of the age limit itself.  In any case, it turned out to be a promise built on sand all along, if not a total statistical mirage.

Tobacco 21 laws, just like the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age, clearly belong on the trash heap of history.  And this is the final nail in the coffin.