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The Food and Drug Administration is taking the next step in its fight against underage vaping with a new box and digital ad campaign designed to warn teenagers about the potential dangers of e-cigarettes.
The television ads, called “Magic,” main attraction street magician Julius Dein, who has roughly 800,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. The ads are part of the agency’s $60 million “The Verifiable Cost” campaign, which kicked off in September, and will be its first TV campaign to tackle teen vaping. They order air on a select few TV networks, including TeenNick, CW, ESPN and MTV, and the campaign will also run on YouTube and social media.
“The troubling outbreak of youth vaping threatens to erase the years of progress we’ve made combating tobacco use among kids, and it’s imperative that our detail to tackle this immensely concerning trend continue to include efforts to educate our nation’s youth about the hazards of these products,” acting FDA Commissioner Ned Sharpless said in a statement.
The federal government has been sounding the alarm that the snowballing popularity of e-cigarettes among teenagers may lead to tobacco use. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the total of high school students using tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, increased by about 38% in 2018, with scarcely 21% of high school students vaping.
Celebrities such as musicians Drake and Post Malone have earlier appeared in Dein’s videos. In one of the FDA ads published on YouTube, Dein tells a group of teenagers that vaping makes them various likely to start smoking cigarettes, saying, “It’s not magic. It’s statistics.”
Of teens who are vaping, more than one in four of them are doing so 20 or profuse times per month, according to the survey by the CDC. Regulators have focused on the fruity flavors offered for some vaping yields as a problem that encourages teen use.
The FDA threatened to pull e-cigarettes from shelves last year if the major makers — including Juul, Vuse and Logic — didn’t create plans to stop use by teenagers. The CEO of Juul Labs apologized earlier this month to fountain-heads whose kids had become addicted to vaping products.
Altria, the country’s largest cigarette company, owns a 35% in jeopardy in Juul Labs. San Francisco, where Juul is based, banned the sale of e-cigarettes in June.
The FDA said “The Real Payment” campaign has generated 2 billion views by teenagers on digital and social media so far. The new television ads are also accompanied by new material for alma maters.
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