according to data from the 2019 Monitoring the Future study.
Almost half (47.1%) of the 12th graders who had used Juul e-cigarettes in the past 30 days reported that mint was the flavor they most often used, compared with 23.8% for mango and 8.6% for fruit, which is a combination of flavors, Adam M. Leventhal, PhD, of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and associates wrote in JAMA.
Mint was also the flavor most often used by 10th graders (43.5%), with mango again second at 27.3%, and fruit third at 10.8%. Eighth-grade students switched mango (33.5%) and mint (29.2%) but had fruit third again at 16.0%, the investigators reported, based on data for 1,739 respondents to the Monitoring the Future survey who had used a vaping product within the past 30 days.
Juul has suspended sales of four – mango, fruit, creme, and cucumber – of its original eight flavors, Dr. Leventhal and associates noted, and e-cigarette flavors other than tobacco, menthol, and mint have been prohibited by some local municipalities.
“The current findings raise uncertainty whether regulations or sales suspensions that exempt mint flavors are optimal strategies for reducing youth e-cigarette use,” they wrote.
As this article was being written, the Wall Street Journal had just reported that the Food and Drug Administration will ban mint and all other e-cigarette flavors except tobacco and menthol.
SOURCE: Leventhal AM et al. JAMA. 2019 Nov 5. doi: 10.1001/jama.2019.17968.