Georgiana Bostean, PhD

Despite continued declines in the cigarette smoking rate in California’s youth, adolescent vaping (use of electronic smoking devices for nicotine, cannabis, or both) is on the rise. Concurrently, new specialty retailers (vape shops and cannabis dispensaries) have emerged, but their impact on youth use is not well understood. There is an urgent need to understand the factors contributing to the increasing use of tobacco and cannabis products among youths so that we can achieve California’s goal of reducing youth tobacco use prevalence to 8% by the end of 2020. Our study will be among the first comprehensive statewide studies to examine how tobacco and cannabis control policies and retail environments (tobacco retailers, vape shops, cannabis dispensaries) affect adolescent smoking and vaping—crucial information for policymakers aiming to curb the youth vaping epidemic.

Update:  During this project period, we acquired, cleaned, and combined data from five different sources—on locations of all tobacco shops, vape shops, and cannabis stores operating in California (CA) in 2018, along with the strength of tobacco and cannabis control policies in CA cities and unincorporated county areas, and sociodemographic and ecological data for these areas. Our preliminary findings show that: (1) there are some disparities in policy strength, and they vary in nature for each type of policy (overall cannabis control policy strength, overall tobacco control policy strength, policy specific to retail environment for tobacco and vape), and (2) cities with higher policy strength policy strength have a higher density of vape and cannabis retailers.