A new UNC study shows just how easily teens can buy e-cigarettes online, in violation of state law.

“It took little effort for them to bypass the age verification practices of the vendors, because there was very little use of rigorous age verification,” says Dr. Rebecca Williams. “Only five orders were rejected due to age verification and we had an e- cigarette purchase success rate of 94 percent.”

Williams is a researcher at the UNC Lineberger Cancer Center. She recruited a group of teens to purchase e-cigarettes from 98 websites. A law passed in 2013 requires online sellers to verify age using a public records database, but the teens were able to type in false birth dates or lie about their ages.

“While seven of the vendors in the study claimed to use age verification techniques that would potentially comply with North Carolina law, only one of them actually did,” says Williams.

The e-cigarette industry is growing rapidly, yet remains largely unregulated. While proponents argue that they offer a healthier alternative to smoking tobacco, Williams says a growing body of research says otherwise.

“More and more research is coming in that shows that e-cigarettes are dangerous and in some ways maybe more dangerous than cigarettes. For example, there was a study that came out recently that showed that e-cigarettes can release five to ten times more formaldehyde than a typical cigarette does.”

Most troubling, she says e-cigarette use is on the rise among teens.

“The CDC has reported an annual doubling in the rate of teens reporting using e-cigarettes. Hundreds of thousands of teens annually are using e-cigarettes that never smoked cigarettes before.”

Williams calls for federal regulations that mandate age verification at the time of purchase and delivery.

“It’s important that we have federal regulations affecting these sales, and specifically, strictly enforced federal regulations, because without that, online e-cigarette vendors have little motivation to decrease their profits by spending the kind of time and money it takes to verify a customer’s age and reject underage buyers.”

You can read the full study in The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics.

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