Syracuse, N.Y. — The back wall of a vape shop in an Onondaga County strip mall is filled with tiny, brightly colored boxes. There’s watermelon and blue raspberry. Do you like mint? They have that, too. Any flavor of vape you can think of, it’s there, the clerk says.
They’re all illegal.
New York first outlawed flavored vapes in 2019 in response to a teen vaping epidemic fueled by candy-flavored nicotine smoke. Kids come for the sour apple and cotton candy; they stay because they get addicted to the nicotine. Teens not old enough to drive were ending up in emergency rooms with lungs that looked like they belonged to 80-year-old smokers. They called it “popcorn lung.”
But the flavored vape ban has been largely ignored by county health officials and vape shops. The illegal vapes are still sold in dozens of shops around Central New York, openly on display on shelves to lure youths into the habit that has become a national child-health disaster.
Some clerks who work in the shops that sell the vapes in Onondaga County know they’re illegal. Others appeared to have no idea. Syracuse.com visited eight vape shops and convenience stores in Onondaga County. Clerks in the stores that were selling vapes asked not to be identified because they were not allowed by their bosses to talk to a reporter.
A clerk at one vape shop said their lawyer told them what they were selling was “legal-ish.” If the county comes and fines them, or tells them they have to stop selling, they’ll deal with it, he said. He was smoking a peanut butter custard vape as he talked. The room filled with sweet, earthy chocolate smoke.
For years, public health officials have provided data showing how flavors drive the youth vaping epidemic. Getting rid of the sour apple, chocolate and gummy bear smoke is the key to ending the problem. Recent data shows continued rampant use of flavored vapes by youth. According to an annual national survey on youth tobacco usage done by the Centers for Disease Control, more than 2 million high school students regularly vaped and 85% of them used flavored vapes.
When New York passed the law banning flavored vapes, county health departments were left on the hook for enforcing it. In some places, especially small counties, that’s a heavy lift. Many had bigger problems to focus on during the pandemic.
But once the pandemic peak subsided, the vape ban was largely forgotten.
Onondaga County has not been enforcing the ban but after being contacted by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, Environmental Health Director Lisa Letteney said the county will begin citing stores that sell flavored vapes.
There are 400 shops in the county that have licenses to sell vapes, Letteney said.
She said the department sent educational letters to stores at some point, telling them the flavored vapes were illegal but that they had not fined or cited anyone. The county has been enforcing the part of the same law that makes it illegal to sell any vape product to someone under 21.
Letteney said the state hadn’t given the county enough guidance about how to enforce the law. But the law clearly states what is illegal and the sanctions: For each package of flavored vapes offered for sale, a store can be fined $100. They can lose their license to sell vapes and they can lose their license to sell lottery tickets, which many vape stores offer.
Cayuga County has cited and fined some stores for selling flavored vapes, said Eileen O’Connor, director of environmental health there.
One store, the Panda Smoke shop, was fined $20,000 this month. O’Connor said that was not the shop’s first violation.
Schools and parents in Herkimer and Oneida counties were so overwhelmed by vaping problems that they asked state police for help. School officials told police that kids were inhaling so much flavored nicotine smoke that they became ill and had to be hospitalized, said police Investigator Donald Moore.
The result was “Operation Vaporizer,” Moore said.
In late August, teens working undercover with police went into 20 stores to buy vapes. More than half the stores made the sale.
They were charged for making the sale to a kid, but all of the shops were violating the flavor vape ban, too, Moore said.
“Every single store I was in had flavored vapes,” he said.
But because the flavored vape ban is a public health law and enforced by the health department, the police could not do anything about it. The clerks who were charged with selling to minors will have to appear in court on a misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child.
A Syracuse.com spot check of eight vape shops and convenience stores in Onondaga County revealed that convenience stores owned by large chains appeared to follow the ban, selling only unflavored and tobacco-flavored vapes.
A clerk at an independent gas station said they didn’t sell flavored vapes but a small display included Summer Luv and Banana Cherry flavored vapes. The clerk at one gas station that didn’t sell flavored vapes offered directions to a shop that offered hundreds of flavors.
The clerk at a smoke shop that’s part of a chain said their corporate management won’t let them sell flavored vapes because they are illegal. But someone can come set up shop next door and sell them with impunity, he said.
A few miles away in a suburban strip mall near a high school, a clerk ran down the list of flavored vapes she had lined up on in candy-colored boxes on the back wall.
When asked if they were legal, she responded: “I don’t know. Do you want to buy it or not?”
Marnie Eisenstadt writes about people, public affairs and the Syracuse City School District. Contact her anytime email | Twitter| Facebook | 315-470-2246.
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