Earlier this month, the Colorado House committee on Business Affairs and Labor demonstrated their commitment to the lives and health of millions of Coloradans, including the state’s youth, as well as the survival of responsible small businesses in voting down Senate Bill 022, which would have allowed county governments to ban the sale of flavored vaping products.

On its face, banning any product with nicotine might seem like a policy geared toward promoting individual health; and certainly that was likely the bill sponsor’s intent. The issue, however, is far more complicated than that, and the real-world consequences of the bill would have been directly opposite the intent.

The problem with what has come to be known as “flavor bans” – prohibitions on the sale of flavored vaping products – is that far from keeping kids from using tobacco and nicotine, and reducing smoking in general, they in fact encourage cigarette use and incentivize internet sales of vaping products. Flavor bans also hamper the efforts of adults who are trying to improve their health by quitting smoking.

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Copious amounts of research have well established the link between flavor bans and increased cigarette sales. The simple fact is flavored vape products are critical to helping people quit cigarettes. Vaping products do not contain charcoal or tar, the two ingredients in cigarettes most responsible for the plethora of health problems – including cancer, heart disease and emphysema – caused by cigarettes. Vaping products contain a fraction of the chemicals found in combustible cigarettes. And the flavors in vaping products are what encourage people to turn to them instead of cigarettes. Without the flavors, there is little incentive to keep smokers from returning to their old habits.

Flavor bans also disproportionally target historically disadvantaged minority communities. The American Civil Liberties Union, Drug Policy Alliance, and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership all signed a coalition letter warning of these impacts. We all understand increased state and local penalties will disproportionally impact communities of color.

In addition to making it harder for adults to quit smoking, flavored vape bans are counter-productive when it comes to keeping teens from using tobacco. Local flavor bans simply encourage our tech-savvy youth to buy vaping products online, thereby creating an unregulated electronic black market out of reach of any local controls.

Not only will the anonymity of online purchasing eliminate the front-line control of a store owner who can enforce the rules against selling to minors, but the products these young people will have access to are themselves largely unregulated, leading to a much higher risk of teens gaining access to products and devices that are of lower quality, and far more dangerous.

Equally concerning is the fact banning flavored vape products entices young people to try more harmful forms of tobacco use like cigarettes. Teen use of vaping products and e-cigarettes is a problem that deserves our attention, but there are far more effective ways to continue the reduction in teen vaping than by banning the products most effective at helping reduce smoking overall.

Several common-sense efforts to appropriately regulate the vaping industry at the state and federal levels have been successful in reducing the numbers of young people who use these products. In fact, youth vaping rates have consistently reduced during the last five years according to the FDA. These efforts should be allowed to continue to work before we enact legislation that could undo all the progress we have made. 

There is another aspect to flavor bans to consider as well: the businesses that will be hurt by this are small, independent vaping stores like ours – not the Big Tobacco corporations. Small mom-and-pop vaping businesses, the owners of which are almost exclusively former smokers who realize the value of flavored vape products in reducing cigarette use would be pushed out and replaced by Big Tobacco – companies like JUUL, which operate on a vastly different model.

In our small stores, we sell large, open-tank vaping products that cannot be hidden in a pocket or purse, which are the preferred vaping products of adults looking to quit smoking, and which contain low levels of nicotine. JUUL, by contrast, sells small, easily hidden vape pens, often with far higher levels of nicotine. We also do not sell online; as local brick-and-mortar shops, we can control whom we sell to. We check (and double check) IDs, utilize the latest technology to ascertain the veracity of those IDs, and work within our communities to ensure we are not selling to minors. JUUL cannot promise that and has little interest in doing so.

Flavor bans have nothing to do with promoting health – they are about securing market position for Big Tobacco. We want to express our gratitude to those state representatives – Ryan Armagost, Regina English, Sheila Lieder, William Lindstedt, Tisha Mauro and Naquetta Ricks – who recognized this, and by voting against this proposal displayed a noble concern for the health and wellbeing of their neighbors and constituents.

Phil Guerin is president of Rocky Mountain Smoke Free Alliance (RMSFA) Board of Directors and owner of Myxed Up vape stores. Jason Casados is vice president of Rocky Mountain Smoke Free Alliance (RMSFA) Board of Directors and owner of Vapor Source vape stores.