Since last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has planned a crackdown against vaping industry to curb the epidemic of underage vaping. The agency has already fined over 1300 retailers for selling e-juices and e-cigarettes to minors. Moreover, it has shortlisted five e-cigarette companies to provide the authority with a comprehensive and detailed plan outlining how they will prevent teen vaping and raided an e-cigarette company’s headquarters and confiscated all their documents.

The FDA planned to intervene further such as demanding a ban on flavored e-juices, banning stores from selling e-cigarettes and imposing age verification system for online sales. However, these plans were never enacted and the FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb resigned from his position in April 2019.

The FDA may have stopped but the city of San Francisco has continued the drive. San Francisco has recently become the first U.S. city to impose a ban on e-cigarette and flavored tobacco products sales. The ban is also being imposed on online purchases shipped to a San Francisco address. The ordinance does allow certain restrictions to be lifted once a vaping product has undergone a premarket review by the FDA. However, no vaping product has undergone a premarket review to date.

Do you think that it will work? Seeing the world’s history we can say that the government’s efforts to reduce or completely eliminate vices often become failures. Experts believe that it can motivate more dangerous and unhealthy behaviors amongst teens and youth. The Drug Awareness and Resistance Education Program (DARE) was designed to educate children about the dangers of drug use in hopes they would not use them later in life. Despite receiving considerable funding and support from the government, research finds the program resulted in more drug experimentation.

It is exactly like anti-obesity campaigns launched by the government agencies that have resulted in higher obesity rates. The FDA first passed regulation banning e-cigarette sales to minors in 2016. However, teen vaping rates have increased since the agency became involved. Moreover, the youth may not turn towards illegal alternatives to cope with their addiction.

San Francisco may become the first U.S. city to ban e-cigarette sales but let’s hope that it does not become the city that falls prey to its well-intended yet disastrously harmful policy.