# Assessing the impact of vaping control policies at the school, local and state levels

> **NIH NIH R01** · MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL · 2024 · $752,093

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) are the most significant entry into the market for nicotine in
decades, disrupting patterns of nicotine use as well as other substances such as combustible tobacco and
cannabis. The rapid rise in vaping has caused public health professionals concern, particularly with respect to
high use among youth, leading to significant efforts at regulation. At the same time, there is increasing
evidence that under proper circumstances, ENDS may be an effective smoking cessation aid and harm
reduction tool. As a result, ENDS regulation is likely to have broad impact, affecting the use of not only ENDS,
but also combustible cigarettes and other vaped products (i.e., cannabis), and differentially affecting use and
outcomes for youth, young adults, and adults. A comprehensive effort is needed to understand the potentially
far-reaching consequences of ENDS policy. Federal, state, and local governments have instituted efforts to
control youth ENDS use and protect non-users from ENDS vapor. Public policies may be placed principally into
five categories: 1) raising the legal purchasing age to 21, 2) restricting or prohibiting sales of flavored products,
3) limiting stores where ENDS may be used or sold, 4) restricting where ENDS may be used (e.g., clean indoor
air laws), and 5) taxing ENDS
. Schools have also instituted policies and programs to curb ENDS use. In the
proposed research, we will obtain publicly available data on ENDS policy enactment and use qualitative
methods (key informant interviews) to investigate the adoption and implementation of ENDS policies by states
nationally and by localities and schools in eastern Massachusetts. Next, we will leverage natural experiments
induced by policy introductions at different places and times to rigorously evaluate how these specific ENDS
control efforts, individually and in combination, affect ENDS, tobacco, and cannabis use among youth, young
adults, and adults. To this end, our analyses will combine policy data from public documents, databases, and
our interviews with large national datasets (e.g., the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System and the
Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) and a limited-access local data set from eastern Massachusetts
(the MetroWest Adolescent Health Survey) from 2014-2025. Analyzing data from this extended period will
allow adequate follow-up after major recent state and national policy changes as well as the major disruptions
of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using our estimates of how policies impact these substance use outcomes, we will
conduct simulation analyses using the Simulation of Tobacco and Nicotine Outcomes and Policy (STOP)
microsimulation model to project the potential short- and long-term impact of alternate ENDS control policy
configurations on behaviors and health. These complementary efforts, synthesizing new, high-quality inputs
and analyses, will provide a comprehensive assessment of the impact of ENDS control ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10898751
- **Project number:** 5R01DA054935-03
- **Recipient organization:** MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
- **Principal Investigator:** Douglas Levy
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $752,093
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-09-01 → 2027-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10898751

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10898751, Assessing the impact of vaping control policies at the school, local and state levels (5R01DA054935-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10898751. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*