Washington (AFP)

The US Congress passed a law Thursday raising the minimum age for the purchase of tobacco and electronic cigarettes across the United States from 18 to 21 years next year, seized by an anti-vaping offensive since the brand's boom Juul in high schools.

Tobacco and electronic cigarettes will therefore join alcohol and cannabis (in states where it is legal) as products limited to adults 21 years of age or older. So far, 19 of the 50 states have imposed this minimum age, most since this year.

The new federal law generalizes it everywhere, from Alaska to Florida, and the change will be effective in about nine months, the time to publish implementing decrees specifying the sanctions against violating stores.

This increase aims to combat the dazzling popularity of vapers among college and high school students in recent years, while fewer and fewer young people are consuming alcohol and traditional cigarettes.

27.5% of high school students in "twelfth" (equivalent to the terminale) said they had vaped in the last 30 days, according to the annual survey conducted by the government in 2019, against 11.3% in 2016.

Another benchmark survey published Wednesday, Monitoring the Future, shows that 52% of high school students said they had drunk alcohol last year, against 73% in 2000. For cigarettes, the proportion of high school students who smoked in the last month fell to 5.7%, almost half less than in 2016.

Not only is vaping increasing, but more and more young people are vaping cannabis. 14% of high school students declared having done so in the 30 days preceding the questionnaire.

But the measure voted on Thursday is far from what the government of Donald Trump was considering in September: an outright ban on flavored electronic cigarettes, popular with young people.

The summer also saw a health crisis grafted onto the problem of young e-cigarette smokers: vapers, often in their twenties, started to get seriously ill from the lungs. An extensive health investigation has revealed that the cause was an ingredient often added to cannabis-infused refills sold on the black market, vitamin E acetate. To date, 2,409 patients have been identified, and 52 people have died.

- Retreat on flavored e-cigarettes -

The American president, initially favorable to the ban on aromas, finally backed down, apparently persuaded by advisers that it would cost him votes in the presidential election of November 2020. The industry and the owners of "vape shops" had demonstrated to the White House under the slogan "We vapotons, we vote".

In the meantime, the leader in e-cigarettes, the American Juul, associated with the tobacco giant Altria, has voluntarily stopped selling its fruit, mango or cucumber flavors in the United States, leaving only the tobacco and menthol flavors (in other countries, the brand continues to sell other flavors).

Donald Trump and the industrialists have all stood behind the solution of raising the minimum age to 21 years.

Anti-smoking and vaping activists remained scandalized by this compromise.

"Juul and Altria have seized the issue of 21 for their own vile reasons, to cover up their battle against the ban on flavored e-cigarettes," said Matthew Myers, president of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. , bete noire of cigarettiers.

The age threshold of 18 did not prevent generations of adolescents from obtaining alcohol and cigarettes, recalls Rob Crane, president of the Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation, because controls and sanctions against businesses have always been insufficient.

He blames the American drug agency, the FDA, which has authority over tobacco. "His neglect of vendor controls is one of the reasons that 5.2 million American college and high school students regularly inhale highly concentrated nicotine," said Rob Crane.

The FDA, which had promised new e-cigarette regulations for the fall, appeared to be paralyzed since President Trump's resignation in November.

© 2019 AFP