The Brief

When the FDA first asserted the authority to regulate e-cigarettes in 2016, many people assumed the agency would quickly get rid of vapes with flavors like cotton candy, gummy bears, and Froot Loops that appeal to kids.

Instead, the FDA allowed all e-cigarettes already on the market to stay while their manufacturers applied for the OK to market them.

Seven years later, vaping has ballooned into an $8.2 billion industry, and manufacturers are flooding the market with thousands of products — most sold illegally and without FDA permission — that can be far more addictive.

“The FDA has failed to protect public health,” said Eric Lindblom, a former senior adviser to the director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. “It’s a tragedy.”

Yet the FDA isn’t the only entity that has tolerated the selling of vapes to kids.

Multiple players in and out of Washington have declined to act, tied the agency’s hands, or neglected to provide the FDA with needed resources. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both have prevented the FDA from broadly banning candy-flavored vapes.

Meanwhile, today’s vapes have become “bigger, badder, and cheaper” than older models, said Robin Koval, CEO of the Truth Initiative, a tobacco control advocacy group. The enormous amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes — up 76% over five years — can addict kids in a matter of days, Koval said.

E-cigarettes in the U.S. now contain nicotine concentrations that are, on average, more than twice the level allowed in Canada and Europe. The U.S. sets no limits on the nicotine content of any tobacco product.

“We’ve never delivered this level of nicotine before,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which opposes youth vaping. “We really don’t know the long-term health implications.”

Elijah Stone was 19 when he tried his first e-cigarette at a party. He was a college freshman, grappling with depression and ADHD, and “looking for an escape.” Store clerks never asked for his ID.

Stone said he was “hooked instantly.”

“The moment I felt that buzz, how was I supposed to go back after I felt that?” asked Stone, now 23, of Los Angeles.

The e-cigarette industry maintains that higher nicotine concentrations can help adults who smoke heavily switch from combustible cigarettes to vaping products, which are relatively less harmful to them. The FDA has approved high-nicotine, tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes for that purpose, said April Meyers, CEO of the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association.

“The goal is to get people away from combustible products,” said Nicholas Minas Alfaro, CEO of Puff Bar, one of the most popular brands with kids last year. Yet Alfaro acknowledged, “These products are addictive products; there’s no hiding that.”

Although e-cigarettes don’t produce tar, they do contain harmful chemicals, such as nicotine and formaldehyde. The U.S. Surgeon General has warned that vaping poses significant risks: including damage to the heart, lungs, and parts of the brain that control attention and learning, as well as an increased risk of addiction to other substances.

More than 2.5 million kids used e-cigarettes in 2022, including 14% of high school students, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most U.S. teen vapers begin puffing within an hour of waking up, according to a survey of e-cigarette users ages 16 to 19, presented at the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco in March.

The potential for profits — and lax enforcement of vaping laws — has led to a gold rush. The number of unique vaping products, as measured by their bar codes, quadrupled in just one year, rising from 453 in June 2021 to 2,023 in June 2022, according to a Truth Initiative review of U.S. retail sales data.

FDA officials say they’ve been overwhelmed by the volume of e-cigarette marketing applications — 26 million in all.

“There is no regulatory agency in the world that has had to deal with a volume like that,” said Brian King, who became director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products in July 2022.

The agency has struggled to stop e-cigarette makers who continue selling vapes despite the FDA’s rejection of the products, as well as manufacturers who never bothered to apply for authorization, and counterfeiters hoping to earn as much money as possible before being shut down.

In 2018, public health groups sued the agency, charging that the delay in reviewing applications put kids at risk. Although a court ordered the FDA to finish the job by September 2021, the FDA missed that deadline. An estimated 1.2 million people under the legal age of 21 began vaping over the next year, according to a study published in May in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Recently, the FDA announced it has made decisions on 99% of e-cigarette applications, noting that it had rejected millions and authorized 23. All authorized products have traditional tobacco flavors, and were deemed “appropriate for the protection of public health” because tobacco-flavored products aren’t popular with children but provide adult smokers with a less dangerous alternative, King said.

The agency has yet to make final decisions on the most popular products on the market. Those applications are longer and need more careful scientific review, said Mitch Zeller, former director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products and a current advisory board member for Qnovia, which is developing smoking-cessation products.

The FDA said it would not complete reviewing applications by the end of June, as it previously forecast, but would need until the end of the year.

Before the FDA can announce new tobacco policies, it needs approval from the president — who doesn’t always agree with the FDA’s priorities.

For example, Obama rejected FDA officials’ proposal to ban kid-friendly flavors in 2016.

And in 2020, Trump backpedaled on his own plan to pull most flavored vapes off the market. Instead of banning all fruit and minty flavors, the Trump administration banned them only in “cartridge-based” devices such as Juul. The flavor ban didn’t affect vapes without cartridges, such as disposable e-cigarettes.

The result was predictable, Zeller said.

Teens switched in droves from Juul to brands that weren’t affected by the ban, including disposable vapes such as Puff Bar, which were allowed to continue selling candy-flavored vapes.

After receiving its own warning letter from the FDA last year, Puff Bar now sells only zero-nicotine vapes, Alfaro said.

When the FDA does attempt bold action, legal challenges often force it to halt or even reverse course.

The FDA ordered Juul to remove its products from the market in June 2022, for example, but was immediately hit with a lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with Juul and issued a temporary stay on the FDA’s order. Within weeks, the FDA announced it would hold off on enforcing its order because of “scientific issues unique to the JUUL application that warrant additional review.”

E-cigarette makers Logic and R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co. both sued the FDA after the agency ordered them to stop selling menthol vapes, a flavor popular with teens. In both cases, court-imposed stays halted the FDA’s orders pending review and the companies’ menthol products remain on the market.

Luis Pinto, a spokesperson for parent company Reynolds American, said, “We remain confident in the quality of all of Reynolds’ applications, and we believe that there is ample evidence for FDA to determine that the marketing of these products is appropriate for the protection of public health.”

Under the Biden administration, the FDA has begun to step up enforcement efforts. It fined 12 e-cigarette manufacturers more than $19,000 each, and has issued more than 1,500 warning letters to manufacturers. The FDA also issued warnings to 120,000 retailers for selling illegal products or selling to customers under 21, King said. Five of the companies that received warning letters made vapes decorated with cartoon characters, such as Minions, or were shaped like toys, including Nintendo Game Boys or walkie-talkies.

In May, the FDA put Elfbar and other unauthorized vapes from China on its “red list,” which allows FDA agents to detain shipments without inspection at the border. On June 22, the FDA announced it has issued warning letters to an additional 189 retailers for selling unauthorized tobacco products, specifically Elfbar and Esco Bars products, noting that both brands are disposable e-cigarettes that come in flavors known to appeal to youth, including bubblegum and pink lemonade.

In October, the Justice Department for the first time filed lawsuits against six e-cigarette manufacturers on behalf of the FDA, seeking “to stop the illegal manufacture and sale of unauthorized vaping products.”

Some lawmakers say the Justice Department should play a larger role in prosecuting companies selling kid-friendly e-cigarettes.

“Make no mistake: There are more than six e-cigarette manufacturers selling without authorization on the market,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a March letter. Children are “vaping with unauthorized products that are on store shelves only because FDA has seemingly granted these illegal e-cigarettes a free pass.”

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New data shows Waymo’s robotaxis are crashing less often as they log more miles driven in Los Angeles. Experts recently joined LAist 89.3’s AirTalk with Larry Mantle and said the numbers are encouraging but don’t tell the whole story.

The data: Analyzed by the Los Angeles Times, it found:

• Crash rates are down from 57 crashes per million miles driven in 2023 to under six this year.
• The majority of Waymo-involved crashes happened while the vehicle was stopped. However, Waymos are designed to stop when they encounter issues.

Why safety is improving: Better technology, remote human help, and human drivers getting accustomed to Waymos are likely reasons safety is improving, Matthew Raifman of UC Berkeley told AirTalk listeners.

Concerns: Former federal auto safety regulator and UCLA law professor Ann Carlson stressed on air that Waymo’s improving safety record shouldn’t be extrapolated onto other autonomous car companies like Tesla’s Cybercab or Amazon’s Zoox, both of which have had recent safety issues.

Listen: To the full AirTalk segment above to hear about the challenges involved in making autonomous cars safe in every environment.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s restrictions on generative artificial intelligence have drawn mixed reactions from education experts and students.

The district said in a statement to EdSource that its new Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee is working on specifics and will bring policy recommendations to the school board by the end of this academic year.

Here’s what experts and students have to say about the approach.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Stephen Aguilar, professor of education at USC who leads the Center for Generative A.I. and Society

As a general rule, I am against blanket bans.

The core idea that I try to get across when we’re talking about screen time bans or AI bans is that we’re treating these technologies as though they are uniform, almost like a drug. AI is an umbrella term that refers to lots of different types of technologies.

Before everyone was talking about generative AI, cognitive tutors were AI-based tutoring systems that helped kids learn math. They can be very good at providing hints and diagnosing which concepts specifically students have issues with.

Teachers are often under-resourced and not respected in terms of the decisions that they end up making in the classroom. And policies aside, teachers end up defining almost 100% what the learning environment looks like for the kids that are under their charge.

So, I think that any real solution to this challenge involves giving teachers, and to a lesser extent parents, good information backed by sound science about the effects of different technologies.

Professional development is one way. Teachers need to be responsive to the emerging science about how kids learn — not because learning changes fundamentally, but because the tools we use to learn change.

Lucrecia Santibañez, professor of education and faculty co-director of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools 

I think [AI bans are] probably the correct approach. As we learn more, some of these policies may be revised.

It is easier to ban it in the elementary grades because kids are learning basic skills. They’re learning how to read, write, do basic math and understand concepts about science.

What gets tricky in high school is that every kid pretty much has a smartphone, so their ability to independently access AI is really high. As teachers get better trained to use AI in their own teaching and assignments, we may see more of a hybrid model.

One of the guiding pedagogical questions for me is: Is doing the tasks themselves an important part of what students are meant to do? If you want students to brainstorm, for example, some of that needs to be practiced first before it is delegated to an AI companion.

An analogy that makes sense is to treat classrooms like gyms. If you want to get fit and be able to run, you have to do it yourself. And it is the same way with education.

Chaitra Sure, senior at Taft Charter High School in Woodland Hills 

I don’t frequently use AI, but I do observe people in the classroom using it. I would say it’s mostly used to give the answer, and then they [students] just move on without really understanding.

I think this ban is mainly because a lot of students don’t know how to use AI effectively in an educational sense. But I don’t think the ban is going to really restrict usage. We can use precedents like the phone ban. I don’t see my peers using phones any less.

But I think what we need right now is some sort of class or lesson integrated into the curriculum that teaches us how to use artificial intelligence more effectively, which we’re not taught.

With the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence and technology beyond high school, in college and in careers, it’s going to become much more important to know how to use AI. I think what would be more effective is having a required curriculum or more opportunity in school to learn how to use artificial intelligence more effectively.

It’s going to be so helpful for the future.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

Bernie Sanders. Jane Fonda. There’s some star power endorsing each of the two Democratic candidates to be California’s next insurance commissioner.

Sure, it has historically been a little-known regulatory position. But its profile and importance are rising after a decade of some of the most destructive and deadliest wildfires in the state, which have disrupted one of the world’s largest insurance markets.

Not a homeowner? The commissioner's actions still affect your wallet if you're a renter, driver, pet owner, landlord, business owner, buyer of life insurance or possible user of workers' compensation.

If voters elect Jane Kim, the former San Francisco supervisor is proposing a drastic change that could have come out of the playbook of Sanders, her most famous backer: public disaster insurance.

If state Sen. Ben Allen wins, the movie star-backed candidate wants to get everyone on board to help reduce wildfire risk — individuals, communities, fire experts, local and state officials and the insurance industry — which he says would help solve the availability and affordability issues around homeowners insurance.

Voters are deciding between two candidates with a lot in common, including extensive track records of consumer advocacy, but who are offering very different ways of trying to solve the state’s insurance problems. At a debate between them moderated by CalMatters on Thursday, Kim characterized her opponent as offering to “tinker” and uphold the status quo, while Allen referred to Kim’s plans as “totally unprecedented and unmoored.”

The commissioner leads the Insurance Department, whose responsibilities include approving how much insurers can charge customers for property and casualty insurance, such as home, auto, commercial, renters, pet and travel.

A few years ago, some insurance companies stopped writing or renewing homeowner policies in areas with high fire risk, saying the state wasn’t approving their rate requests quickly enough so their prices weren’t matching the risk. That pushed homeowners into the FAIR Plan, a pool of insurers required to sell policies to those who can’t buy them from the regular market. The plan’s policies are generally more expensive and provide less coverage.

Last year, Commissioner Ricardo Lara rolled out new regulations that include faster rate reviews — when the Insurance Department looks at an insurer’s request to charge more money — and letting insurance companies factor reinsurance and catastrophe models into their rates. The department says the new rules are working because some insurers have said they plan to write more policies in the state again, though the state has not shared how many.

The new rules are generally leading to higher prices. Homeowners insurance rates in California rose 5% in the first half of the year, one of the largest increases in the nation, according to Insurify, a comparison site.

Meanwhile, average auto insurance premiums in the state are among the highest in the nation as replacement costs have gone up with the cost of vehicles. Both candidates said they hope to increase awareness of a state program that provides low-cost auto insurance to low-income drivers; Kim wants to expand it.

The Insurance Department reviews insurer practices and conducts investigations, though it’s limited in what it can order companies to do, as survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires in January 2025 have found as they struggle to rebuild partly because of insurance-claim delays and denials.

The candidates’ records

One of the candidates was in a position to take action on the issue: The governor recently signed Allen’s Senate Bill 1209, which increases the commissioner’s ability to compel insurers to fix problems the department finds after an investigation.

For example, the department found that State Farm violated the law in its handling of claims from last year’s fires in the Los Angeles area and recommended penalties, but the case has yet to go to a hearing. Although the law Allen authored, which was co-sponsored by Lara, is not retroactive, it should give the future commissioner additional power to hold insurers more accountable.

Democratic state Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón is among many fellow lawmakers endorsing Allen in the race.

She said the senator, who represents the Palisades, “jumped into action the second he heard about the fire.” That meant assessing the situation, rallying his staff and going to his district immediately afterward, she said.

“From the start to now, he has been active,” Limón said. “He has authored legislation, held town halls and brought stakeholders together.”

She worked with him on the climate bond that voters approved in 2024 that is now helping fund water infrastructure, wildfire prevention and more. Allen, who also authored a landmark plastics law to reduce pollution that continues to face blowback, has been a champion of the environment — hence the support from Fonda’s climate political action committee.

“He has been able to land some of these difficult deals,” Limón said.

Allen has been a state senator since 2014 and is terming out. In his last legislative session, he authored two other laws that will affect the insurance market: One will establish a state-backed loan program for homeowners to upgrade and harden their homes against fire. The other will require insurers to give homeowners more details if they’re planning to drop their coverage, and give homeowners time to fix the issues to try to retain their insurance.

“This law’s going to help people help existing coverage, and keep them off the FAIR Plan,” Allen told CalMatters. “We have to think about holistic solutions.”

Kim has not held an elected office since 2019. Her most recent jobs were California director for the Working Families Party, and before that, California political director for Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

A fellow former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recalled Kim’s impact during her time there. It includes helping pass the first $15 minimum wage ordinance in the state, securing tenant protections and providing free community college for the city’s residents.

“I got to witness for eight years a woman that was tenacious and relentless,” said Malia Cohen, the state controller who’s running for another term.

Cohen said she and Kim represented different districts in San Francisco and sometimes had opposing priorities: “She has been my enemy and my friend.”

She recalled working with Kim to “ban the box” that formerly incarcerated people used to have to check on job applications, a city ordinance that became a model for the state.

At a rally last week in San Francisco where Sanders campaigned for Proposition 40, the billionaire wealth tax, Kim delivered a speech in which she chalked up her grit to her mother and being drawn to public service from her father, both immigrants.

From left, insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna join hands and wave to supporters during a “Ballots Over Billionaires” rally at the Curran Theater in San Francisco on Oct. 3, 2026.

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Manuel Orbegozo

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CalMatters

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“My mother taught me to negotiate relentlessly in a world that did not see her, and it is what allowed me to walk into a room full of older white men and demand 40% affordable and middle-income housing,” Kim said, referring to her dealings with developers in San Francisco.

“She passed legislation in San Francisco that has shaped the California landscape,” Cohen said.

The candidates’ platforms

Kim and Allen have a lot in common. Each has promised to be tough on the insurance industry, including by pushing for insurer transparency and creating public report cards for them.

Both candidates have support from different labor, environmental and civil rights groups. But with two Democrats vying for the position for the first time, the endorsements reflect the divide within the party that has been highlighted by the victories of progressive candidates elsewhere, such as that of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The California Democratic Party endorsed Allen, while the California Labor Federation endorsed Kim. Both U.S. senators from California, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, endorsed Allen. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, the Democrat from Silicon Valley who has long been aligned with Sanders, endorsed Kim.

“I think Jane is a strong progressive,” Khanna told CalMatters in San Francisco earlier this week. “She understands that the big oil companies should be paying for the extreme conditions that are causing wildfires in California.”

Kim’s proposal for public disaster insurance, which she said would be funded by premiums policyholders already pay to insurance companies, would allow consumers to keep their existing coverage. It would split off fire and flood coverage. The state would run the program and could invest some of the revenue from premiums into wildfire risk mitigation and not into the fossil-fuel industry like insurance companies do, she said.

Kim’s plan aligns with proposals by experts who say the current insurance model is failing because of growing risks, and that public involvement is the answer. A report by the California Earthquake Authority, which was tasked with studying how the state can boost its catastrophe resiliency, includes an analysis of a state-backed wildfire insurer.

The insurance industry and some consumer advocates have slammed her plan, saying it’s a bad idea to shift catastrophic burden to the state. A San Francisco Chronicle endorsement of Allen said Kim would “blow up” the insurance system during a time when the regulations Lara implemented last year need more time to work.

Kim said onstage at the rally with Sanders in San Francisco last week: “They will tell us our ideas are too expensive or magical thinking, but the status quo is not the safest path. It is the most expensive one.”

She has pointed to New Zealand’s public disaster system as an example. At the debate on Thursday, Allen voiced a frequent criticism: The coverage that system provides is limited and doesn’t include wildfire.

“What matters is not the type of catastrophe but that we are covering catastrophe, and that we would work to cover up to a median price of a home,” Kim responded. She said New Zealand covers catastrophes that exist in their country, like mudslides and earthquakes.

Kim also wants to create a public option for low-cost auto insurance by expanding the state’s existing program for low-income drivers. Allen says that would allow drivers who have more resources to take advantage.

Allen’s plan for comprehensive wildfire risk mitigation — which the recent earthquake authority’s report analyzed, too — would include pushing the insurance industry to do more than “pay lip service” to reducing fire risk. Some homeowners have complained that their home-hardening efforts haven’t led to significant savings on their premiums, or ensured that they will be able to buy affordable insurance.

“The commissioner is uniquely positioned to force the industry to the table to be a part of the solution, to help to incentivize and reward real, meaningful resilience and risk reduction all over the state,” he told CalMatters.

At the debate, Allen said his approach is “grounded in the realities we’re facing now, and how we actually fix the system as it is.”

Allen has said his plan includes thinking about mitigation as early as the development process. “We shouldn’t be building new construction that is irresponsible in high-risk areas,” he said earlier this year, before he and Kim ended up being the top two vote-getters in the June primary election.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.