For decades, Big Tobacco has misled the public, covered up the dangers of smoking and targeted young people with manipulative marketing. Now it's happening again. Only this time, it's with flavored e-cigarettes, nicotine pouches and other tobacco products. Cotton candy. Bubble gum. Sugar cookie.
In Colorado, smoking is still the leading cause of preventable death, killing more than 5,100 people each year. More than 460,000 Colorado adults continue to use cigarettes and annual health care costs in the state due to tobacco use are $2.19 billion. Nearly one in four cancer deaths in Colorado are attributable to smoking.
11.6% of Colorado high school students use tobacco.
In 2025, 26.5% of Colorado high schoolers and 11.4% of middle schoolers reported that they had tried vaping.
Nearly 90% of youth who use e-cigarettes use flavored products. These come in kid-friendly packaging with flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and blue raspberry.
Vaping devices can deliver massive doses of addictive nicotine and toxic chemicals like formaldehyde and lead.
Over 40% of U.S. high-school e-cigarette users are frequent or daily users. They’re not just experimenting. They’re addicted.
Use of nicotine pouches among high school students increased significantly between 2022 and 2025, with 460,000 youth reporting current nicotine pouch use in 2025.
Tobacco companies keep spending billions to market cigarettes while aggressively pushing new products – including e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches – designed to hook kids and grow profits. Each year, the industry spends over $117 million in Colorado alone to market its products.
The U.S. Surgeon General has concluded that nicotine use in any form, including e-cigarettes, is unsafe. It can harm the parts of the adolescent brain that are responsible for attention, learning, mood and impulse control. It can also prime the brain for addiction to other drugs.
Starting in the 1950s, the tobacco industry deliberately targeted Black Americans by marketing menthol cigarettes through music event sponsorship, magazine ads, youthful imagery, price discounting and retail promotions. The consequences have been devastating:
88.1% of Black smokers use menthol cigarettes, compared to just 31.4% of white smokers.
Menthol cigarettes are more addictive and harder to quit.
More than 50,000 Black Americans die each year from smoking-caused illness.
Ending menthol cigarette sales nationwide would save 654,000 lives, including 255,000 Black Americans, over the next 40 years.
Targeted marketing has also made menthol cigarettes the choice of half of Hispanic smokers. LGBTQ+ young people use cigarettes and e-cigarettes at higher rates compared to their non-LGBTQ+ peers.
Removing kid-friendly tobacco products from store shelves is proven effective to reduce tobacco use. Across Colorado, local communities have passed laws to fight back against the tobacco industry’s relentless efforts to addict residents to their harmful products. But until now, Aurora has been left out.
It’s time to protect Aurora kids and our entire community by ending the sale of flavored tobacco products.
