Vaping industry-funded academic scholarships

Introduction

While the benefits versus the risks of increased e-cigarette use among adults remains unsettled, the fact that 21% of high school students in 2018 have used e-cigarettes in the last month is concerning to almost all policymakers and clinicians.1 A recent e-cigarette marketing technique involves the promotion of scholarships for students. Given the novelty of these promotions, we undertook an analysis to understand how widespread this practice is in the USA, along with characteristics of such scholarships.

Methods

We conducted Web-based searches from June to August 2018 for publicly accessible documents related to scholarship opportunities by e-cigarette companies to youth or young adults. Words used to search for opportunities included combinations of ‘vaping’/‘e-cigarette’/‘electronic cigarette’/‘ENDS’ and ‘manufacturer’/‘company’/‘industry’/‘trade association’/‘distributor’ and ‘scholarship’/‘university’/‘college’/‘education’/‘essay’/‘award’/‘fellowship’. We omitted duplicate entities and secondary reports. We then extracted data from each website that described a scholarship opportunity related to e-cigarettes.

Results

We discovered 21 entities that were offering…

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