photo by: Associated Press

In this Saturday, Dec. 22, 2018 file photo, a woman takes a puff from a vape pen in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

As a bill targeting illicit e-cigarettes makes its way through the Kansas Legislature, a health official in Lawrence says the problem of unauthorized vape products is real, and that underage buyers here might have access to them.

The bill is Senate Bill 355, and it passed the Kansas Senate and was sent to the House last week. As Kansas Reflector reported, it would impose the same licensing and advertising requirements on e-cigarettes as other nicotine products. And it would prohibit marketing them to children, such as by depicting cartoon characters or celebrities on them.

Here in Lawrence, where a local retail tobacco licensing program has been in place since 2023, the health department has seen problems with tobacco sales to youth, and with illicit vaping materials showing up on store shelves.

“It is known that e-cigarettes available on the market are largely illegal as they are not FDA approved,” Vicki Collie-Akers, Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health’s director of policy and planning, said in an email to the Journal-World. “This is a significant problem.”

Before the Senate voted on the bill on Feb. 11, Sen. Joe Claeys, a Wichita-area Republican, said that most FDA-approved vape products came from the biggest tobacco companies. He characterized the legislation as a kind of “regulatory moat” for those companies – “a licensed-to-licensed supply chain that locks out their unlicensed competitors.”

“And I’m fine with that,” Claeys said. “I encourage it. Because the illegal vape market is real, Chinese products are targeting our kids, and the (attorney general) has told us he needs tools to act.”

In Lawrence, Collie-Akers said the department took a closer look at this problem after hearing about a study by Rutgers and Penn State researchers that suggested only about 14% of e-cigarettes on the market were FDA approved. The city tobacco licensing program provided them a vehicle through which to examine the issue: undercover compliance checks.

Since 2023, the department has been doing the checks at retailers around the city to see whether they sell nicotine products to people under 21, in violation of local, state and federal laws. “The aforementioned study prompted us to review the products which our undercover, underage buyers purchased,” Collie-Akers told the Journal-World, and they found that retailers had sold them “several unapproved products.”

“This suggests that these unapproved products are widely available in Lawrence, and somewhat accessible to underage buyers,” Collie-Akers said.

Whether the legislation will help with this problem, she said, depends on how strongly the state can enforce it.

“To the extent that this bill would be focused on certifying only FDA-approved products and has a clear enforcement element, this bill may be helpful,” she said. But she added that “a significant portion of retailers do not comply with existing portions of the law already, so if a strong enforcement element is not present, it is not likely to have an impact.”

The violations of existing laws were evident in Lawrence, Collie-Akers said. In 2025, the health department conducted compliance checks at 81 retailers, and 17% of them failed those checks. That’s lower than the 19% that failed in 2023, but not by much.

Citations were issued to the violators, she said, and in three cases tobacco retailers were caught selling to underage buyers twice in one year and had their licenses suspended for one week as a result. The Journal-World has reported on all three of those: VIP Smoke Shop, Tobacco Royal and Puffing Bear Smoke Shop. During the suspensions, they were required to stop selling tobacco products and remove all such products and advertising from public view; during its suspension, VIP taped brown paper over its windows.

Like Collie-Akers, Claeys said Senate Bill 355 wouldn’t make sense without stronger enforcement, and he said that would take resources. Before the bill passed in the Senate, he successfully introduced an amendment to increase the licensing fee for e-cigarette manufacturers from $500 to $2,500. He said that would be “enough to actually fund inspections, seizures and retailer education.”

“If we’re going to build Big Tobacco a moat,” Claeys said, “let’s make sure Kansas can afford to patrol it.”

Whatever happens at the state level, Collie-Akers and Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health are coming up with ways to better patrol their own community.

In the year ahead, she said the department wanted to strengthen tobacco policies throughout Douglas County on several fronts.

For the City of Lawrence, that might include patching a workaround that some business owners have been using after being cited or suspended. Collie-Akers said that twice in 2025, retailers had responded to a suspension by doing an “informal sale” of the business to a new owner. In one of those instances, she said, the new owner was actually someone who had owned a store that was suspended in the past.

“This shuffling of ownership to avoid consequences of illegal sales needs to be adjusted,” she said, and the department plans to request that the city update its licensing program to make it more difficult.

Collie-Akers also suggested limits on new tobacco licenses for shops within half a mile of a school. Some existing businesses are very close to schools, she said – “For example, one tobacco retailer shares a fence with an elementary school!” And many of the violators are within half a mile of a school building.

The department is also planning to work with school districts to introduce new policies for tobacco use prevention, and it wants to expand its efforts to limit tobacco retailers in other Douglas County communities, too.

Alongside the regulations, Collie-Akers said, it will be important to make the public more aware of the “glut” of tobacco retailers in Lawrence. In some parts of the city, she said, there are almost seven retailers per 1,000 people.

“We have significant concern about the proliferation of tobacco retail in Lawrence overall,” she said. “The number of places in which tobacco products, particularly e-cigarettes and vape products, are available in our community is very high.”

As part of the discussions, Collie-Akers said the department and its partners with LiveWell Douglas County will be holding a Tobacco-Free Living Workgroup meeting at 6 p.m. Thursday via Zoom. She said any interested community members were welcome to attend; the meeting registration form is available at bit.ly/4kmjht7.