You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Ad watch
Major online retailers selling electronic cigarettes as smoking cessation products in the USA
  1. Eric K Soule1,2,
  2. Joseph G L Lee2,
  3. Desmond Jenson3
  1. 1 East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
  2. 2 Department of Health Education and Promotion, College of Health and Human Performance, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
  3. 3 Public Health Law Center, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Eric K Soule, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA; soulee18{at}ecu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2019-055168

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    No electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) available in the USA have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be marketed for smoking cessation, and any such approvals would only apply to a specific product rather than e-cigarettes as a class of products. Accordingly, any marketing of e-cigarettes that explicitly or implicitly states that they are for cessation assistance (or any other medical purpose) would violate the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.1 However, in May 2019 searches of three top internet retailer websites (Amazon, Walmart, eBay),2 we found numerous e-cigarettes identified explicitly or implicitly as cessation products. At Amazon.com some e-cigarettes and their accessories were found under the ‘Health and Personal Care>Healthcare Care>Smoking Cessation’ category (see …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors ES conducted the search of the retailer websites and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. JGLL and DJ provided critical review on the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.