Is vaping now an epidemic among US high schoolers?

The Food and Drug Administration seized thousands of pages of documents during an inspection of the San Fransisco headquarters of e-cigarette maker Juul, the agency announced today.

The surprise inspection of Juul continues an aggressive new chapter in the FDA’s war on the “epidemic” of underage vaping, as FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb recently put it. The agency has cracked down on e-cigarette businesses in general and Juul in particular.

“The JUUL inspection, which we completed on Friday, sought further documentation related to JUUL’s sales and marketing practices, among other things, and resulted in the collection of over a thousand pages of documents. The inspection followed the Agency’s request for information that we issued to JUUL Labs in April for documents that would help us to better understand the reportedly high rates of youth use and the youth appeal of JUUL products, including documents related to marketing and product design.”

Last month, the agency specifically called on Juul and four other e-cigarette makers to present plans that prove their products can be kept away from teenagers. The companies were given 60 days before the FDA said it would take further action, including the possible ban of flavored products.

While there are hundreds of e-cigarettes on the market, Juul remains the most popular, especially among teenagers, according to Nielsen, which found that Juul represented nearly 55 percent of the e-cigarette retail market as of March.

Although e-cigarettes are believed to be somewhat safer than tobacco cigarettes, and users can vape without nicotine, evidence shows they are still not safe, particularly for teens’ still-developing brains.

The Surgeon General has cited a 900% increase in e-cigarette use by high school students from 2011 to 2015, and the 2016 National Youth Tobacco Survey noted that 1.7 million high school students said they had used e-cigarettes in the previous 30 days.

For middle school students, the number was 500,000.