What Vapes Are Being Banned and Which Are Still Legal

The vast majority of vaping products sold in the United States right now are technically illegal. Out of more than 25 million premarket tobacco product applications submitted to the FDA, only 23 received marketing authorization as of early 2023, and all of those were tobacco-flavored products from a handful of brands.¹ That means nearly every fruity disposable, every candy-flavored pod, and every mint cartridge you see at a gas station or vape shop is being sold without FDA authorization. The legal landscape is a patchwork of federal rulings, state flavor bans, and enforcement gaps that together create a confusing picture for anyone trying to figure out what is actually allowed.

What the FDA Has Actually Authorized

The FDA began requiring vaping companies to submit premarket tobacco product applications in 2020. Companies had to demonstrate that their products were “appropriate for the protection of public health,” a standard that weighs the potential benefit to adult smokers trying to quit against the risk of attracting young nonsmokers. The scale of what followed was staggering: millions of applications poured in. The agency denied or refused the overwhelming majority, and by March 2023, just 23 products had been granted marketing orders.¹ All of the authorized products are tobacco-flavored. No fruit, no dessert, no menthol, no mint. The brands that received authorization include certain Vuse products (from R.J. Reynolds) and a small number of others. If you are using a product that does not carry an FDA marketing order, it is on the market without legal clearance, even if no one has physically removed it from store shelves yet.

Why Unauthorized Products Are Still Everywhere

The gap between what is authorized and what is actually available is enormous. A study tracking the devices and liquids used by adults who vape frequently found that in 2023, only about 1% of participants were using an FDA-authorized device, and fewer than 1% were using an FDA-authorized liquid. The most commonly used device brand was Elf Bar, a disposable product with no FDA authorization.¹ The market has effectively outrun the regulatory process. Disposable vapes in particular have surged: the share of disposable devices among frequent users more than doubled between 2020 and 2023, while refillable tank systems shrank considerably.

Enforcement is a bottleneck. The FDA has issued warning letters and pursued import alerts against specific brands, particularly those popular with young users, but the sheer volume of products and the ease of importing new ones from overseas manufacturers means that removing unauthorized products from the market is something like playing whack-a-mole. Retailers with the highest rates of age-restriction violations include tobacco and vape specialty shops, liquor stores, and certain gas station chains, and the proliferation of these retail outlets in some states has made enforcement even harder.²

The Synthetic Nicotine Loophole and Its Closure

For a while, some manufacturers exploited a significant loophole. The FDA’s authority over tobacco products originally extended only to products derived from the tobacco plant. Synthetic nicotine, made in a lab rather than extracted from tobacco leaves, fell outside that authority. Companies quickly pivoted, marketing their products as containing synthetic nicotine to avoid the entire premarket application process. Congress closed that loophole in 2022, granting the FDA explicit authority to regulate synthetic nicotine products as well.³ After that change, synthetic nicotine vapes became subject to the same premarket review requirements as tobacco-derived ones. Products that had been skirting regulation suddenly needed authorization they did not have and, in most cases, could not get.

State-Level Flavor Bans

Beyond the federal picture, a growing number of states have enacted their own restrictions on flavored vaping products. These vary widely. Some states have banned all flavored e-cigarettes. Others have restricted only non-tobacco or non-menthol flavors. A few imposed emergency bans that later expired or were struck down in court.

New Jersey’s 2020 statewide flavor ban provides a useful case study. Research found that the ban did reduce sales of flavored e-cigarettes in the short term, but sales of unflavored (tobacco-flavored) e-cigarettes increased to partially offset the decline.⁴ Massachusetts went further with a broader ban on flavored tobacco and vaping products. An analysis of sales data found that Massachusetts’s ban was associated with a roughly 7.5% increase in combustible cigarette sales compared to what would have been expected without the ban. States that restricted only non-tobacco flavors saw a smaller but still measurable bump, around 4.6%.⁵ The implication is uncomfortable: when flavored vapes disappear from stores, some people go back to smoking.

Surveys of young adults who use flavored e-cigarettes paint a similar picture. When asked how they would respond to a hypothetical flavor ban, most exclusive vapers said they would simply continue vaping by finding other products. But a meaningful minority of dual users (people who both vape and smoke) said they would shift to combustible tobacco. Among dual users, nearly two in five reported responding to real-world flavor restrictions by using combustible tobacco. Fewer than 3% of respondents across all groups said they would quit all forms of tobacco entirely.⁶ Flavor bans clearly change behavior, but the direction of that change is not always what policymakers hope for.

What Is Happening With Menthol

Menthol has been one of the most politically charged flavors in tobacco policy. The FDA proposed a ban on menthol cigarettes that has been debated for years, and menthol-flavored vaping products sit in a similar regulatory gray zone. No menthol e-cigarette has received FDA marketing authorization. At the state level, some jurisdictions that banned flavored vapes explicitly included menthol, while others carved out exemptions. The net result is that whether you can legally buy a menthol vape depends heavily on where you live.

Adding to the complexity, many disposable vapes use synthetic cooling agents rather than actual menthol to produce a cold or icy sensation without technically being “menthol-flavored.” Research on Australian and U.S. market products found that WS-23, a synthetic cooling compound, was detected in every disposable e-cigarette tested, often in high concentrations, and there was no reliable correlation between the use of cooling-related terms in the product name and whether the product actually contained cooling agents.⁷ In practice, this means products labeled “ice” or “frost” deliver a menthol-like experience through a chemical that may fall outside menthol-specific regulations. The safety profile of inhaling high concentrations of these synthetic cooling agents is not well studied.

Chemical Risks in Unauthorized and Counterfeit Products

The safety concern with unauthorized vapes goes beyond nicotine and flavor. Disposable e-cigarettes that have never been through any regulatory review can contain materials and manufacturing shortcuts that would not pass scrutiny. A recent study analyzing popular disposable brands found that some contained leaded bronze in non-heating components that came into contact with e-liquid, leaching lead into the aerosol that users inhale. Risk assessments for those products found that cancer risks from nickel and antimony, and non-cancer toxicity risks from lead and nickel, exceeded established safety thresholds.⁸

Cannabis vaping products carry their own set of risks. A scoping review of heavy metals in cannabis vapes found that structural elements of the devices leached metals including nickel, chromium, lead, cobalt, cadmium, and copper into the aerosol as tiny particles.⁹ These findings underscore a basic reality: products that have never been reviewed for safety may be built with cheap materials that expose users to toxic metals with every puff.

Counterfeit products are a separate and arguably scarier category. Fake versions of popular brands are widely available, particularly through informal channels and social media. Adolescents in qualitative interviews described awareness that counterfeit vapes circulate in their social circles, with some reporting knowledge of peers who experienced severe adverse reactions. In one focus group, a participant described witnessing a classmate lose consciousness almost immediately after using a suspected counterfeit THC cartridge.¹⁰ The risks of unregulated counterfeit products include exposure to hazardous chemicals, adulterants, and in the case of THC cartridges, contamination with substances far more dangerous than what the user expected.

Youth Vaping Is Actually Declining

One piece of context that often gets lost in the alarm about vaping: youth use has been falling. National Youth Tobacco Survey data show that e-cigarette use among middle and high school students declined significantly between 2022 and 2025, with an annual percent change of roughly negative 18%.¹¹ E-cigarette use among youth dropped from about 7.7% in 2023 to 5.9% in 2024, driving much of the overall decline in youth tobacco use.¹² By 2025, overall youth tobacco use stood at 7.2%, and e-cigarettes remained the most commonly used product at 5.2%.¹³

Whether this decline is a result of regulation, changing attitudes, or some combination is hard to pin down. But it does complicate the narrative that vaping among young people is an endlessly worsening crisis. The trend is genuinely moving in the right direction, even as unauthorized products remain widely available.

The Rise of Nicotine Pouches

As vapes face increasing regulatory pressure, nicotine pouches have quietly become the second most popular tobacco product among youth after e-cigarettes. Use of nicotine pouches doubled among middle and high school students from 0.8% in 2021 to 1.7% in 2025.¹³ Brands like Zyn have received FDA marketing authorization for certain products, placing them in a different regulatory position than most e-cigarettes. Public discourse around the FDA’s authorization of Zyn pouches has been largely neutral to supportive, with discussions emphasizing harm reduction benefits, though concerns about addiction and youth appeal have also surfaced.¹⁴

The nicotine pouch category is worth watching because it occupies a space that vapes increasingly cannot. These products deliver nicotine without combustion or inhalation, they are discreet, and some have cleared the FDA’s authorization bar. If regulatory pressure continues to squeeze the vaping market, pouches may absorb some of the demand, particularly among adults looking for alternatives.

The Harm Reduction Debate Behind the Bans

Virtually every vaping regulation is shaped by a fundamental tension. On one side is the possibility that vaping serves as a genuine harm reduction tool for adult smokers who cannot or will not quit nicotine entirely. Inhaling nicotine vapor, while not harmless, almost certainly exposes users to far fewer toxic chemicals than burning tobacco. On the other side is the risk that flavored, accessible vaping products attract young nonsmokers who would not otherwise have used nicotine at all.¹⁵ Clinicians are caught in the middle, recognizing that e-cigarettes could help some smokers while worrying that widespread youth adoption may undo decades of declining nicotine use.¹⁶

This tension explains why regulators have been willing to authorize tobacco-flavored products but not fruity or sweet ones. The logic is that tobacco flavor is more likely to appeal to current smokers making a switch and less likely to attract young people who have never smoked. Whether that logic holds up in the real world is debatable. The data from Massachusetts and New Jersey suggest that restricting flavors pushes some users toward cigarettes. And the overwhelming dominance of sweet-flavored liquids in the actual market (more than 80% of liquids used by frequent vapers were sweet-flavored in both 2020 and 2023) suggests that the products regulators are comfortable authorizing are not the products most adults actually want to use.¹

How Other Countries Handle It

The United States is not the only country grappling with vape regulation, and different nations have landed in very different places. The European Union imposes some of the most stringent requirements on nicotine concentration, capping e-liquids at 20 mg/mL. Several EU member states have also banned flavors, required plain packaging, or mandated that vaping products be kept out of sight at retail.¹⁷ Compare that to the U.S. market, where the median nicotine concentration among products used by frequent vapers climbed from 12 mg/mL to 50 mg/mL between 2020 and 2023.¹ That increase is striking: while EU consumers are capped at 20, the typical U.S. product now delivers more than double that concentration. Countries like Australia have gone even further, effectively requiring a prescription for nicotine-containing vaping products, though compliance with that system has been inconsistent.

The Environmental Cost of Disposables

One dimension of the disposable vape boom that rarely gets discussed in the context of bans is the environmental toll. Single-use e-cigarettes contain lithium-ion batteries, plastic housings, and several hazardous materials. They are not designed to be disassembled or recycled, and most end up in general waste or, worse, littered.¹⁸ The shift toward disposables (which now represent over a third of devices used by frequent vapers, up from less than a fifth in 2020) means that millions of small batteries and toxic components are entering the waste stream every year. Some countries, including the UK, have cited environmental concerns as part of the justification for proposing or enacting bans on disposable vapes specifically. In the U.S., the environmental argument has gained less political traction, but the material reality is the same: each disposable device is a small package of electronic waste with no practical recycling pathway for most consumers.

1
PubMed Central. Decisions of the FDA on premarket tobacco product applications: Changes in the number of unique devices and liquids used by US adults who frequently use electronic nicotine delivery systems, 2020-2023
2
PubMed Central. Weak Age Restriction Enforcement and Retailer Proliferation Reveal Limits in Tobacco Control Policy
3
JAMA Health Forum. FDA Gains Power to Regulate Synthetic Nicotine in e-Cigarettes
4
PubMed. The Impact of New Jersey’s 2020 E-cigarette Flavor Ban on E-cigarette, Cigarette, and Cigar Sales in New Jersey
5
PubMed. The Impact of Banning Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems on Combustible Cigarette Sales: Evidence From US State-Level Policies
6
Nicotine & Tobacco Research. Responses to Real-World and Hypothetical E-Cigarette Flavor Bans Among US Young Adults Who Use Flavored E-Cigarettes
7
Nicotine & Tobacco Research. Synthetic Cooling Agents in Australian-Marketed E-cigarette Refill Liquids and Disposable E-cigarettes: Trends Follow the U.S. Market
8
ACS Central Science. Elevated Toxic Element Emissions from Popular Disposable E‑Cigarettes: Sources, Life Cycle, and Health Risks
9
PubMed Central. Heavy Metals in Cannabis Vapes and Their Health Implications—A Scoping Review
10
PubMed Central. Adolescents’ Perceptions, Experiences, and Reactions to “Fake” Vaping Devices
11
PubMed. Tobacco product use among middle and high school students in the United States: National Youth Tobacco Survey, 2025
12
PubMed Central. Forecasting Youth Tobacco Use With the National Youth Tobacco Survey Data (2021–2024): Implications for Dental Public Health and Cessation Counseling in the United States
13
PubMed. Tobacco Use Among Middle and High School Students: 2025 National Youth Tobacco Survey
14
Tobacco Control. FDA authorisation of Zyn nicotine pouches: cross-sectional analysis of public discourse on X
15
PubMed Central. E-Cigarettes—a review of the evidence—harm versus harm reduction
16
JACCP: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF CLINICAL PHARMACY. Evidence Regarding E‐Cigarettes as a Harm Reduction Strategy and Treatment for E‐Cigarette Cessation: An Overview and Guide for Clinicians
17
PubMed Central. Emerging electronic cigarette policies in European member states, Canada, and the United States
18
PubMed. Not-so-disposable e-cigarettes: Methods young people use to discard single-use e-cigarettes