On September 17, the Georgia House committee studying the “youth vaping epidemic” holds its third and final meeting as it pushes for the creation of a statewide vape registry.
Earlier in 2024, the legislature adjourned before the Senate had considered House Bill 1260, AKA the Georgia Nicotine Vapor Products Directory Act. Had it passed, the bill would have created a registry for vape products that had pre-market tobacco product applications (PMTA) either approved or under consideration by the Food and Drug Administration. Manufacturers would add their product to the registry voluntarily.
Legislators formed the Safety & Consumer Protection of Nicotine Vapor Products Study Committee in March. At the committee meetings held September 5 and September 9, law enforcement officers and school administrators took turns giving wildly inaccurate testimony about how United States teenagers are being killed off en masse by unregulated, disposable flavored vapes imported from China.
The September 9 meeting featured a slideshow titled Flavored Disposable Vape–The New Face of Organized Crime, describing how the epidemic was leading children down a path toward transnational drug trafficking. It was kept off-camera during the livestream, due to apparently containing top-secret law enforcement intelligence.
“Again, everything’s Chinese, from China. What else is China bringing into the United States?” asked copresenter Carlos Sandoval. “Methamphetamine. Cocaine. Vapes is another new product, it’s opening another door for organized crime and cartels.”
“The kids [are saying], ‘Well, I made this amount of money selling e-cigarettes on the streets, what’s the next step? …I’m gonna sell guns.’”
The Drug Enforcement Administration cocaine signature profiling program indicates that 97 percent of the cocaine supply comes from Columbia, and the rest from Bolivia and Peru. “CSP analysis has consistently indicated that Colombian-origin cocaine dominates the market in the United States,” the agency stated in its 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment. “These forensic findings are consistent with all available law enforcement intelligence and investigative reporting.”
Sandoval might have meant to say “fentanyl,” which is the much more common substance to cite in this sort of argument as well as the subject of the persistent, entirely manufactured “fentanyl in vapes” narrative. Which we’ll get to in just a moment.
“The kids [are] selling some of these products too, later on,” Sandoval continued. “‘Well, I made this amount of money selling e-cigarettes on the streets, what’s the next step? Drugs. I’m gonna sell methamphetamine. I’m gonna sell cocaine. I’m gonna sell guns.’ It doesn’t stop, they get that taste of money in their hand.”
Synthetic nicotine was briefly villified, per the popular false narrative around synthetic drugs being more dangerous than plant-based ones, but it does not appear to be as big a part of the agenda as THC vapes. Which the FDA does not regulate.
Despite the fact that the both study committee and the tabled bill are purportedly about nicotine vapor products, the committee appeared to be about equally preoccupied with THC. Both were described as “highly addictive,” “silent killers,” often interchangeably.
Similar PMTA registries are being enacted in states across the country. All of the small number of vaping products cleared by the FDA so far are owned by tobacco companies, and many tobacco harm reduction advocates view registry bills as Big Tobacco attempting to control a vape market currently dominated by unregulated products. Industry data show unregulated, flavored disposable vapes eating into cigarette sales as people switch.
Georgia has been angling for such a registry since 2022. The state’s other vape-interdiction efforts include criminalizing public vaping in 2023 (anecdotal reports suggest that that this somehow did not stamp out public vaping).
Those who have given testimony at the committee meetings so far have also spoken favorable of raising Georgia’s tobacco tax—currently 37 cents per pack of cigarettes, the second-lowest in the country (Missouri’s is 17 cents). But of course they weren’t suggesting we incentivize vaping with lower taxes. Vapes were generally described as either more harmful than combustible cigarettes or else full of mystery ingredients that were probably more harmful, we just couldn’t be sure.
A slideshow at the second meeting showed fentanyl ranked fourth in vape-related concerns among school administrators. It seems that “fentanyl-laced vapes” had put multiple Georgia teenagers in hospitals and there were “some reports of deaths.” There aren’t, though.
At least two news reports from 2023 make the claim that fentanyl vapes had put a teenager in the hospital. One describes a 12-year-old with an elevated heart rate, and no evidence of fentanyl; in the second, a 13-year-old boy had a stroke that his mother attributed to a vape pen that may or may not have contained fentanyl. Neither incident was fatal.
Reports of teens overdosing from fentanyl in vapes—or encountering it at all—tend to be debunked as quickly as they appear. The DEA’s lone example of fentanyl overdose death where the method of consumption was a vape is an ambiguous 2019 report from San Diego. There are no confirmed instances of any teens dying from a fentanyl-adulterated vape.
Vape detectors, which are being installed in school bathrooms across the country, did not appear to be the preferred interdiction method among school administrators. Though appreciated, they were described as time-consuming for staff and too easy for students to circumvent.
One former principal testified that one of the only interventions she’d found helpful was a “rewards program” that used a school communications platform to apparently place small bounties on students who vaped.
“A student could go on there and turn in someone who was vaping in the bathroom,” she said, “and if we were able to prove it they would receive a $25 gift certificate. We called it ‘Snitches Get Riches.’”
Image (cropped) via San Diego County. Inset graphic via Georgia House of Representatives/YouTube.