The agency issued a proposal requiring stores to sequester flavored e-cigarettes to areas off limits to anyone younger than 18. Retailers, including convenience stores and gas stations, will be expected to verify the age of their customers.
“Evidence shows that youth are especially attracted to flavored e-cigarette products,” Gottlieb said in a statement, “and that minors are able to access these products from both brick-and-mortar retailers as well as online, despite federal restrictions on sales to anyone under 18.”
The rate of teenage vaping has risen sharply in the past few years, with 3.6 million middle and high school students reporting that they had vaped last year, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But teenage smoking continues to be at record lows, alongside the general decline in smoking rates, a pattern that public health experts warn could be reversed if nicotine addiction spurred by vaping leads young people to traditional tobacco products.
Last fall, the FDA began a crackdown on teenage vaping, threatening to ban most flavored e-cigarettes and warning retailers to stop selling the products to minors. It stopped short of prohibiting the flavors.
But the proposal issued Wednesday outlines details for how retailers must wall off the areas where the products can be sold. It calls for a physically separated room, a spokesman said, adding that stores cannot simply hang a curtain to create a space where flavored e-cigarettes could be sold.
Retailers, including convenience store and gas station owners, are on Capitol Hill this week, lobbying against the FDA’s proposals. Some have threatened to fight the restrictions in court.
The new restrictions do not apply to menthol, mint or tobacco flavors, which the FDA wants to keep available for adults who are using e-cigarettes to quit smoking combustible cigarettes.
The proposal also calls for banning the sale of many flavored cigars.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.