321981
Electronic Cigarette Sales to Minors via the Internet
Objective: To estimate the extent to which minors can successfully purchase e-cigarettes online and assess compliance with North Carolina’s 2013 e-cigarette age verification law.
Design: Cross-sectional study conducted in February-June 2014.
Participants: Eleven non-smoking minors aged 14 to 17 made electronic cigarette purchase attempts by credit card from 98 Internet electronic cigarette vendors.
Main Outcome and Measure: Rate at which minors can successfully purchase electronic cigarettes on the Internet.
Results: Minors successfully took delivery of electronic cigarettes from 76.5% of purchase attempts, with no attempts to verify age at delivery and 95% of delivered orders simply left at the door. All delivered packages came from shipping companies that, according to company policy or federal regulation, do not ship cigarettes to consumers. 18 orders failed for reasons unrelated to age verification. Only 5 of the remaining 80 youth purchase attempts were rejected due to age verification, resulting in a youth buy rate of 93.7%. No vendors complied with NC’s e-cigarette age verification law.
Conclusions and Relevance: It appears that minors are easily able to purchase electronic cigarettes from the Internet because of an absence of age verification measures employed at Internet electronic cigarette vendors. Federal law should require and enforce rigorous age verification for all e-cigarette sales similar to a federal policy under the Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking (PACT) Act that bans Internet cigarette sales to minors.
Learning Areas:
Public health or related laws, regulations, standards, or guidelinesPublic health or related public policy
Public health or related research
Learning Objectives:
Differentiate between the different types of age verification strategies used by Internet tobacco vendors that sell e-cigarettes.
Describe the extent to which Internet tobacco vendors selling e-cigarettes comply with North Carolina's e-cigarette age verification law.
Describe the ease with which teenagers are able to successfully purchase e-cigarettes online.
Keyword(s): Tobacco Control, Adolescents
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have been the principal or co-principal investigator of studies focusing on the sales and marketing practices of Internet tobacco vendors for over 15 years, and am the principal investigator of the federally funded study that is the focus of this abstract.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.