Last Tuesday, the Carbondale Board of Trustees voted to raise the legal age for purchasing tobacco and vaping products, amid hopes that such a regulation will curb use amongst high school students by up to 50%. The new ordinance is expected to take effect 30 days after legal publication, which will likely happen sometime next week.
Teen vaping rates are on the decline
But while the ongoing panic about teen vaping keeps informing policy, surveys keep indicating that in actual fact, vaping amongst teens is on the decline. The 2016 Monitoring the Future (MTF) annual survey results had clearly indicated that vaping rates had dropped for the second consecutive year, from 16.2% to 12.5% among 12th graders, and from 14.0% to 11.0%, among 10th graders.
Similarly, a report released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in June 2017, clearly indicated that smoking rates amongst high school students were cut in half in only five years, between 2011 to 2016. During this same period vaping amongst the same age group had peaked from 1.5% to 16.0% in 2015. However, fast forward a year and from 16.0% in 2015, vaping rates dropped to 11.3% in 2016, while smoking in that same period also dropped from 9.3% to 8.0%.
Read Further: Aspen Public Radio
