Everything Old is New Again: How the Vaping Industry Borrowed Banned Practices of the Tobacco Industry

The key objective of this research is to determine if health regulators can prohibit marketing products to children based on likely health outcomes without specifying the exact product (i.e., e-cigarettes) and business activity (i.e., advertising). My thesis illustrates how the vaping industry took a tobacco-derived product, e-cigarettes, and employed the same banned marketing activities that helped create the traditional cigarette industry to harm today’s consumers. My analysis directly compares banned marketing practices for cigarettes with ecigarettes regarding advertising, packaging, flavorings, endorsements, marketing campaigns, and targeting of the vulnerable youth population. The thesis will conclude by providing recommendations based on this analysis of how product regulations should be crafted to increase the effectiveness of new regulations to curtail their introduction and dangerous marketing rather than the current post hoc practice of writing regulations to minimize the harm caused by products already on the market.