Nobody needs a vape with a screen

When a friend brought out her vape at a playoff baseball viewing party earlier this month, it immediately caught my attention. I was used to marveling at the various disposable vapes she bought every time her last one ran out of nicotine—the weird flavors, the endless brands—but this product was different. It had a screen. While she was vaping, the device played a silly little animation that reminded me of a rudimentary version of Pac-Man.

In the name of journalism, I visited my local smokehouse this week and sure enough, vapes with screens were everywhere. One product on the shelves, the Geek Bar Pulse X, had a screen that rotated around the device, showing a constellation of stars as you inhaled. Another, the Watermelon Ice Raz vape, featured a basic animation of moving flames. Screen vapes first hit the market late last year and have only recently become widely available. Online stores sell vapes with screens that show what it looks like planets, rocketsand cars driving in outer space. The screens are small—only a few inches wide at most—and they’re cheap: These products cost as little as $25 and can last for months.

The Watermelon Ice Raz vape I spotted in the store reminded me of the loading screens on the old Game Boy Color. I could see how adults like me could be tempted by the nostalgia of it all. The problem is that kids might like these vapes too. It is illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to buy vapes, but the gadgets have been popular among teenagers since Yuul first popularized them. Although youth vaping has declined in recent years, thanks in part to public campaigns to warn children about the dangers of vaping and nicotine addiction, screen use risks reversing the progress made. The screen, filled with animation, communicates that e-cigarettes are “something for fun, games and recreation,” Robert Jackler, a tobacco marketing expert at Stanford University, told me. Just imagine you’re in eighth grade and the cool guy in your class has a vape with a screen that moves with flames. You’ll want one.

These gadgets are fairly new, so it’s not clear to what extent children are using them, but they have all the warning signs. Vape companies are notorious for selling products with kid-friendly flavors like Banana Taffy Freeze and Cherry Bomb, and screen vapes may be the next trick to hook kids. The e-cigarette industry “will do everything it can to introduce new features to attract new users, and this is just another example of that,” Laura Struik, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Okanagan who has studied youth use of e-cigarettes, told me. One of the most popular vape brands among teenagers Mr. Fog has already released a screen vape.

Emily Moorlock, a senior lecturer in marketing at Sheffield Hallam University, told me that screen vapes are at risk of becoming a fad, and fads spread to kids because someone they look up to is using them. This was certainly my experience as a child. I remember begging my parents for a Game Boy because other kids at my elementary school had them. Vaping is similar: when the government asks the children to explain why they tried vaping, the main explanation is that a friend does.

Screens can also make vaping addictive. Even simple visuals like retro video games have been shown to trigger the brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward. Three experts told me that even the rudimentary vapes I’ve come across—the ones that just loop a little animation—can boost dopamine and thus increase users’ cravings for the products.

Tony Abboud, chairman of the Vapor Technology Association lobby group, described them as a technological advance. In addition to animations, many of these screens tend to display how much battery power and vape nicotine is left in the device. Abboud said public health organizations are trying to paint on-screen vapes as “another bad example” of the industry’s marketing to children, even though the rate of vaping among youth is falling. “Just because a new technology has a new feature doesn’t mean that feature was designed to allow the product to be marketed to children,” he said.

Abboud and other vaping advocates believe that e-cigarettes are not just getting kids addicted to nicotine, but also a tool to help smokers quit smoking. Vapes can benefit public health because they are safer than cigarettes and as effective or more effective than other anti-smoking products on the market. Even flavored vapes that appeal to children can also entice adults to switch from cigarettes to vaping.

But the screen serves no purpose other than cheap entertainment. If adult vapers want a low battery alert, this can be solved with a small power indicator like a smoke detector. Flames and constellations are simply not needed. After years of panic over the amount of vaping among young people, it seems that kids are finally realizing that they shouldn’t be vaping. Why risk ruining it because of a small screen?