Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good morning, everyone. This is the Lamar House Committee on Comments and Economic Development. Once again, Thursday, 04/09/2026, at 10:47 in the morning, so we're back in a short break. Continue our discussions with S-one hundred ninety eight, and we'll set off Garen with us from the Battle of Free Vermont. Good morning, Jill. Thanks for joining us.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: Thanks for having me. So yes, I'm representing the Coalition for Tobacco Free Vermont today at the Technique for tobacco free bits. And there's going be some overlap in my testimony, but I'll try to of cruise through that. You can see the colors and how pretty it all is. Basically, we've been playing in the public health arena. We've playing a game of whack a mole. As soon as we get our hands on how to help people stay healthy with these products, they create new products. And there was just an explosion of different products with high nicotine content and flavors and all kinds of things, bells and whistles. It's what drowned us in affordability, so tobacco related healthcare costs, the state, $4.00 4,000,000 annually. 93,700,000.0 of that is Medicaid dollars. So that works out to be $1,000 per household that we pay to take care of tobacco related health care disease. And you can assume that that use was decades ago. So now with the new products where people are using so much, we could be looking at a bit of an increase there. So Rose already showed you a lot of these, but these toy vapes and then the smartphones, you can actually use these to make a phone call or music. So there's all kinds of tobacco products. And like Rose said, there's the Puff to Play video games. So you're getting the dopamine hit everywhere. And then these nicotine pouches, the idea is that that's a way to get off of combustible, but it's actually just exploding where that's a way for kids to get addicted to nicotine because those are very discreet. You put them in your lips, they're called lip fillers.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Can you talk about that? It's not a product I've ever heard of before. Can you just talk about what you've been saying?

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: Yeah, so it's a product that goes right up and it has varying levels of nicotine. And I was just talking to my daughter and her friend who are in college and they said that routinely in class kids could use these. And so one of their friends was putting in three at a time and then getting really nauseous and having to leave class. Because I think we've just gone over a little bit of the nicotine content, but there's just so much more.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Herb has a question. Oh, I don't know if you can see the slide, over the right there was a What does that mean, nicotine free? I guess it's not just nicotine free.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: It is nicotine free, but it is this methyl-six. Andrea might be able to help me describe it. It's a new analog product that technically does not contain nicotine, but it contains another significantly addictive property. So they're again shifting. So it sounds like it's gonna be healthy, but then you're getting addicted to a different product.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Is that covered in this bill?

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: Yes, analogs are covered. Yes, we've got that language in. Last year, we all passed that.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: And just so you know, we're seeing more of those in Vermont. So, a trend.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: So part of what we do is we work with the community coalitions. We work with groups that are working with kids. We've got a couple of folks here today, but there was an article out of Newport, Lila Bennett works up there. We've worked with Herb, the journey to recovery. So she works actually in the Coventry Middle School, she works in the North Country School.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: And what

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: we are seeing is that she gets younger and younger. Fourth grade is an age that Lila named, but then we also heard about fourth grade just a month ago that kids are getting caught with these. I mean, know when a product is getting marketed to them, and this is clearly being marketed to them. So, to that respect, how were fourth graders getting this? Yeah, unfortunately, what Lila talked about is family members. An older sibling, possibly. You've got different kids at school that can be selling them, could be taking them from their parents. We hear all kinds of reports, but I have a slide on that as well. I think Andrea can talk about that because she has data on that. These are the numbers. So these top numbers where it says high school rate of sixteen percent, those are the high schoolers that vape. Eighteen percent use any tobacco product. So that's almost twenty percent of our high schoolers. And then the middle school is where you're starting to see some increase. It's 37% of the high school students that report use, them saying that they use it daily shows addiction. Check what shows addiction? This thirty seven percent of use daily. So that's significant. And then this over here where it says post random high school students will say it would be sort of easy. That's twenty twenty three youth behavioral risk survey data from Vermont. And sixty percent say it's sort of easy. But then this study that just came out in January, it really looked at social media. And what we've heard from kids is that Snapchat is definitely a way that they can get access because those menus can show up at a speed and then it disappears and there's no trace of it. But really looking at Instagram and how a lot of the regulations are not being followed, key to that when we're talking about online sales is this two thirds of tobacco related posts are then showing you the website. So this is where you buy it. And last night I just was at the Geek Bar website and it says, are you 21? And all I have to say is yes. That's how hard the age gating is. I wanted to just show you, and Amy Brewer has the confiscated vapes that she has, but there was a project done over two years of debates from all over the school. And this project was done with support from the Vermont Department of Health. This is public health research response. And so you kind of see what the kids are choosing. So the first year it was this Bloom 34%, right? And 99% of these products are flavored. Keep that in mind. Then when you look at the Loon retail map, you can see there's something going on here. Orange has quite amount of Loon retailers. And then now just one year later, you see this peak bar. That peak bar again is the one that's gonna have much higher nicotine levels. It's got this light up screen on the sides. It's more like a cell phone, so you're used to handling that. And again, it's just this super high nicotine level.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: We don't have, we don't regulate the amount of nicotine.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: No, and again, that's what I think to the FDA's capacity for enforcement and the stuff they're willing to do, and what they have been willing to do, under this restriction. Nicotine levels are super high, and just getting higher.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I know Zone comes in six milligrams and nine milligrams. Canadians can't take the nine milligrams across the border because it's illegal in Canada. Yeah. Because they care. What

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: does the marketing look like for the nicotine content? Like are the products

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: They don't have to label. So they do have to put warning labels on saying this contains nicotine and nicotine is a harmful product, but they do not have to disclose. And I think that goes to going back to what Edye was saying about the study. We're not sure if we need to be studied.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: Do they use marketing language to signal, like high nicotine content? Oh, yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: that's a good question. What I think by the one off, you see all these different colors. I think that they mean that there was only one kind of that kind of shape. But I do have a graph that would answer your You can look at it. It's a little bit confusing, so I took it out of this slide deck. This is a little bit easier to just relate to is again, it's that Geek Bar equals 20 packs of cigarettes and kids can puff all day. So you don't know how much they're getting out of that. And then I wanted to just show you the Geekbars come out with these two flavor series. They're so pretty, so fruity, so appealing to things. In S-one 198, one of the provisions that we feel is very important is taking that penalty off of the youth because they are getting highly marketed to. They are the ones that are really navigating this on their own with the product. And so we wanted to take the penalty off for use, possession, and purchase. We ended up with a compromise language in the Senate that it took the penalties off for possession and use, but it actually increased the penalty for trying to buy with a fake ID. I'd rather that penalty be lower, I want to respect the compromise that the Senate wanted to see some sort of conflict there completely trying to purchase. But what we know is that youth are less likely to come forward if they feel like they're the bad kid, they're ashamed. And so that is a public health equity

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: position. Can

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: you talk about providing cessation tools to kids if they are found with these and how that impacts their use? Yes. And is there a way to write that? Because there was nothing in here. That was right. So

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: we actually had that SAT, if you remember a couple of years ago, that youth would have to go through a cessation program. And we know that there is more opportunity to use cessation. There's a lot of schools, and I think Matt can actually talk a little bit about this too, but there are a lot of schools that are using sort of practices and just trying to get kids help. My la Bennett's program up in North Country and Coventry, what they do is allow the kids to just come in and talk about their substance use and then try to get a bunch of help. And that was really because the principal of your country is saying, there's so many kids dealing with this, that penalties aren't really the way. And then just going back to that online sales, I found this article just talking about how DLL and the AG's office have brought in a lot in penalties. And so I know you've heard from the commissioner that they don't need it, but we feel like we're really going to do something here. Going after the online sales is really going to make that difference because kids are getting highly marketed from social media. And so we do support putting the online compliance investigator back in. This is some other data regarding that. Just wanted to show you there is a pretty cool tool that DLL has to show you appliance. And this is from 2025, shows you that 90%. This is more recent data, but yeah, we support separating that two from one and closing that. We feel that we really want it to be an equalized playing field where everyone is boxed. And then I'm just going to leave you with a quote. So, that's all I have.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Questions for you?

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: Hold on. I was going to show you that slide on the nicotine content, if anybody was interested in that. I'll send it to

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: you, Representative Boutin. Okay. Send it to Jonathan Cooper. Oh, yeah. It's perfect.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Do you know how North Country is funding that program that Lila Bennington is funding?

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: That's a good question. I don't know how that works, but I can ask item 15

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: or even if it's

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: for that.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: If we're taking in more money, maybe we can provide more grants. Yeah.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: That's

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: a good idea.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay. Good job. I mean, that was, you know, taking in more money as you know, thinking about the tax part part of it. One vape equals cart looks like a carton in a hat, which,

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: you know I hope to hear this whole point. One day, that's a whole bunch of magazine. Yeah,

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: I don't know how long.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I And that's when, like if we increase the cost of

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: that, like deterred. Good morning.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Good morning.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you for having

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: me. Happy Prevention Day. My name is Andrea Belanti, I am a professor at Rutgers School of Public Health, and I'm deputy director of our Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies, And I would love to live here in the school year to teenagers, very involved in work with the Department of Health to understand nicotine, tobacco, and substance use. I do receive funding from the NIH and State of Vermont to do this work. So, I'm here to talk about youth protection and just wanted to open up and say that we're excited to see this focus on the retail environment. It's an important place where you are to tobacco products and tobacco use is modernized. And so, young people see in the retail environment, advertising, they see price promotions, they see these product displays that are very appealing, and there's potential access for them to purchase. We know that advertising price promotions are appealing to price sensitive young people. Seeing these products very visibly can normalize use, and in some cases can make young people believe that it's easier for them to purchase these products. So I run the PACE Vermont study, which is a study funded by the Department of Health. And our goal is to understand the impact of state level policies and communication campaigns on substance use beliefs and behaviors in younger mothers. We have been running this study since 2019 with multiple waves of data and we're in current data collection. We're collecting data every six months over a two year period in Vermont, youth and young adults, 12 25. So, I'm gonna share data today from data we collected from a survey we did in the fall in September through October. This is a convenient sample, online participants, it's not representative of all Vermonters, but it gives us a little snapshot of how young people experience the retail environment, what they're exposed to, and how that impacts their perceptions. So we have in our sample a pretty high proportion of young people reporting ever and past thirty day use of cigarettes, nicotine products, a lower proportion reporting past thirty days of nicotine pouches and cigars. But as Jill mentioned, what we see in our data, and she had presented data from two years ago, we still see a high proportion of young people 21, because 21 is the legal age at which people can purchase tobacco and nicotine products. We see a large proportion, 60% reporting that it'd be sort of easy or very easy for them to get tobacco products. And we also ask them about exposure to ads and promotions and where they are exposed to ads and promotions. And so we're looking at people being exposed daily or weekly to promotions for electronic nicotine products. That's what I call vapes. So that's what we're talking about here. And you can see that over a third reporting daily or weekly exposure online or on websites about the same reporting on social media, fewer seeing these ads or promotions in state or local newspapers or magazines or on local radio stations, but a high proportion reporting when they are out and about. So that they're seeing ads for these products when they are in stores, on transportation, by the side of the road. And this proportion is higher for teenagers twelve to seventeen than young adults aged 18 to 25.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: The previous one, the survey was asking how easy it is for kids.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: If you

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: were But to get it, maybe did you drill down more in the survey of how are you getting it?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Yes, I'll get there. Okay. Yep.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thank you. Michael? So I have seen teens, 30% of the stuff that they're seeing is on social media, which is kind of interesting. I don't see any of those ads whatsoever. I know. I get e trike video. Already have one. Yeah. Well, no, I mean. Is that. I mean, obviously it's legal, but should it be legal to because you know who you're advertising to.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Yesterday, I got a text message from a 15 year old. She's doing the Washington Post crossword puzzle on her school Chromebook and getting started fake ads. I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: mean,

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: if it's helpful, just keep in mind, like the NSA was 1998 and addressed tobacco in all these forms, how you advertise to kids, how they're presented in movies, all that stuff. This product came after that. And so by that point, the Fed said they wanted to be the regulator, so they didn't really develop the framework that we have for tobacco. But that's why you don't see Joe Camel anymore, we thought about it in terms of tobacco. It's not that it's illegal, it just hasn't been made illegal, if that makes sense. No one has actually developed this infrastructure of how you stop promoting these products to kids.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: So we talked previously, this is among people who used any nicotine or tobacco product for the past thirty days. We talked about how people get them. And so there were a number of people who said, I didn't buy any products in the past thirty days. The next three top ways that they got, where they got at a vape shop or tobacco shop, a gas station or convenience store, or on the internet. And then you can see also, bought them from another person being next down below. But I just wanna highlight that as Jill was mentioning that very young kids getting access through family and friends, that is one route, but we are seeing that young people are buying directly from retailers, including online and in person? Vending So vending machines, I believe, were outlawed in the MSA except in adult only facilities. I have not seen any vape vending machines.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: I've seen it in New York City. Yeah. Is

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: this nationwide or is this Vermont?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: No, this is all just Vermont data. These are our Vermont youth and young adults, again, from the fall convenience sample. Yeah, so we had A small number of people reporting that.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Now I know the ELO has jurisdiction for liquor through DoorDash, But did we have regulations on DoorDash for selling

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: For having

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: removing vapes or tobacco products?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. It's not allowed.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: It's not allowed.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You have direct information for delivery.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: I would just imagine they're asking the driver, once the driver takes their food order, to do it for them, because you now have a direct communication.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: My

[Evan LeGwen (Burlington Partnership for a Healthy Community)]: I was going to Evan LeGwen, Burlington Partnership for a Healthy Community.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: So I work on a companion project to the PACE Vermont study, which is funded by the FDA to do rapid surveillance of tobacco. Vermont is one of our sentinel sites. So we collect survey data and retail data in Vermont, survey data four times a year, retail data twice a year. And so I just wanted to highlight from our retail audits, again, which happened twice a year, October and April, that we have found a number of new products in Vermont stores that appeal to young people, including these, like you've seen with disposable vaping devices with gaming, this sort of stackable vaping product where you can change the flavors by reordering or stacking different colors or flavors of these products, large displays of these products like juice head that are not authorized for sale. And then pouches and the pouch brands being kind of tied to vaping brands. So E. L. F. And Moon, E. L. F. Bar and Moon are popular vapes, now have pouches that are available in stores here as well. Juice Head a term? Juice Head is just a brand.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It's It's a term for describing people that are

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: No, it like it. It should be a Red Express.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: But does it look like a juice box?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: No, I don't believe it looks like a juice box. I think it looks like a disposable coffee painting you might not have any juice heads, like a kind of square with a mouth.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: But it almost looks like the back up, you know, the cardboard piece of it makes it look like a juice bottle. So

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: why are we talking about all this? And Emily, you have a question?

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Hi, I do. Yeah, thank you. I was curious to know if you all have looked into the incentivizing that these companies do to keep, you know, beyond the actual addictive project. What kind of incentive programs? I know that some of the pouch companies have, you know, coupons and gamification and these sorts of things to keep young people addicted?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Yes, so we have collected some data in our six state study, not just in Vermont, looking at engagement in promotion programs. And I don't have the data off the top of my head, but we are seeing that young people are engaged in rewards programs for these products that the brands use. They get messages via text and email for the products or potentially within an app where they get price promotions or coupons by signing up with the company for different products. ZYN ran a really interesting promotion in September. There were a few stores involved in Vermont through, I believe it

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: was Circle

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Ks, where they gave a free container of ZYN with any tobacco product or pills. Usually we see those sorts of things that are tied with brands that aren't in the same family. This was really, you bought any tobacco or nicotine products and you were sent home with the cannabis in. So we care about this because we care about nicotine because nicotine is a highly addictive compound. And I just want to bring this back to the youth piece. Youth are using these products and most want to quit. This is not something they are happy to be addicted to. This is something they want help getting away from. So we see in the national data that sixty two percent of current users of any product are wanting, have some intention to quit. Sixty five percent actually try. They talk about feeling the impact in their lungs, not being able to imagine what the impact might be in a few years, don't want it to be pinned down to nicotine to get made through the day. And we see this in our own data where among our past thirty day or ever users, thirty percent of cigarette users and forty four percent of our electronic nicotine product users are saying that they're trying to quit or cut down in the past month, depending on the source from that call. So just in conclusion, the retail environment is a really important place where young people gain access to nicotine and tobacco products and establish norms about nicotine and tobacco use. More than 40% of our teams report exposure to nicotine tobacco marketing when they're out and about in stores, for example. They are purchasing nicotine and tobacco products in vape shops, tobacco shops, gas stations, convenience stores. And this bill really proposes a number of steps to protect you by having more control over the retail environment, the products in the environment, and potentially reducing what we've in tobacco initiation.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: You. Very close. Thank you. Have a quick question. My teenagers tell me cigarettes are coming back in. Is that something you see in the as well?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Have asked that question in several different surveys. We're seeing people really reporting stress. There's also seeming to be this kind of shift back to an analog world. All the Super Bowl commercials, I don't know if you noticed, they're all of pixelated 90s type of a situation. The mid 90s is when we saw our highest cigarette use in young people and what really spurred a lot of them say were.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Do

[Unidentified Committee Member]: we see the same, is there a proliferation between overall corporate parents of anything you need? These products now or is it all going back to PMI?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: That is the interesting thing about this. So there are products, most of them is e cigarette pouch products that are in the stores that are owned by one of those large parent corporations like British American Boutin, PMI, Philip Morris International, Altria.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: Those are

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: the products that have gone through the FDA process gotten authorized. And a lot of the products that we're seeing, Geekbar, Loom, Healthbar, these are fly by night organizations, and they shift brand names and they shift as they get hit with enforcement actions. So a lot of these are imported products that are coming in and getting sold, but they're not going through that. Or they might have applications into FDA, but they have not been authorized by

[Unidentified Committee Member]: FDA. Thank you, Doctor. The question I'm now wondering is, do you have any idea what the manufacturing process, it's weird to say quality control, but it's outside of no one has eyes on it.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: And I think to the earlier point, what is on the product, how is it getting marketed? They could say something on the product that's not true, they can use descriptors. We've seen this with white low bile and cigarettes, which one of those descriptors were banned in early 2010s. But one thing I wanted to note was one of the ways that nicotine concentration can be communicated is by PUDCs. So you might see the same nicotine concentration being listed, as Rose mentioned, five milligrams per milliliter of liquid. But as you have a larger volume of liquid, you have more puffs, you have more nicotine in the product, even if the concentration is the same. Emily has your hand raised also.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Hi, thank you for all that. And one more question is on Abbey's point, I've noticed that there seems to be more product placement in media these days for tobacco. Do you know if the federal laws have changed at all as far as what they're enforcing and what they're not enforcing? And if advertising is in fact getting more, I guess, more prevalent for tobacco products?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Yes, I think there have been a number of New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles talking about the presence of tobacco in the media. Rose can speak to whether what is happening on the enforcement side, whether that is in violations. So keep in mind,

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: the MSA dealt with products and industry that existed in 1998. So a lot of these streaming platforms didn't exist. So we've seen a proliferation of actual combustible cigarettes as well as vaping in movies and TV shows that go directly to Apple TV, Prime, Netflix. I'm on a committee with several other states where we have actually gone out to Burbank and tried to meet with them and say, we understand that you didn't exist when the MSA was created, but we want you to adhere to its principles. It's

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: been

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: an ongoing conversation. So yeah, you probably have seen an increase in it. They are technically not covered by the MSA. We've been trying to get them to voluntarily adapt the principles that existed. The major motion movie Chouses, or whatever, they were part of it. So you don't really see it there. But if a show is direct to a streaming platform, that's where you're going to see it. We've been trying to talk to them about maybe putting PSAs in front of a show to show the harm that a kid might see when they're watching the show. But it's an ongoing conversation. What about other substances mix? Is that something that is seen? And is there any kind of testing going on? Just imagine there's other substances that could easily be in There's some nodding over here. Yeah,

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: and I don't know, Amy, if you want to say anything about that, there is a program that the state is working on where they are sending tapes that have been confiscated out for testing. We have these liquids have flavoring additives. They frequently will have various some exposure to metals as a result of vaping, heating and vaping liquid.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: I'll just add, so keep in mind when a company submits their application to the FDA, it's confidential. We have states have asked for the applications to see what they say is in their product, but we've been denied that. It makes sense, the FDA doesn't share medicine make up until it's been approved or we know it's safe from their standard. There are a few universities that have started testing and have found that when they heat up the nicotine, other metals are released. And so we're just sort of learning about that. Also very problematic, but not why there's so many of these products, it's hard to test them all. And like you said, there aren't really quality control systems in place so that it's not clear that one vape from one brand would actually test the exact same way as another vape from the same brand.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Were all Bakes were sold as the safest alternative to smoking tobacco. But I think we're learning more now that it's not any safer than smoking cigarettes.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: I think there's such a variety that you can't really put them in one category. And I think I have been waiting for one of these products to go through the FDA pathway to become a licensed cessation product like NRT or something, and none of them have done it.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Other questions? Thank you. Hello.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: My name is Matt Vigne. I am an SAP at CBU. SAP is a student assistance program counselor, which is really just a long way of saying that I support students and I support students in a range of ways. One of them being substance use. I support students with mental health issues and mental health concerns. And I have a statement I would like to read and then you all can ask me any questions that you have. And so along with my job as the SAP at CBU, I'm also an assistant baseball coach at St. Michael's College. And so the interesting part about the Zins and the nicotine pouches is I would say probably, we got 40 guys on our team. I'd say that 25 of them probably use team couches. And so in some ways, it's kind of like when I was in college and I was playing baseball, chewing tobacco was a thing. It's a big thing in baseball. Now that's kind of completely flipped where, yeah, there's not one guy that chews the old school chewing tobacco. It's all nicotine And they use those all the time. And they get them from a range of places, sometimes even from Europe, where you'll find them having pouches that have fifty milligrams of nicotine instead of the six or the nine. So to me, one of the things that I think I see that increases my concern is the nicotine pouches, because I feel like at least for some of the young men that I spend time in the nicety, it's a very popular thing. So I feel like I wanted to say that off the top. But I appreciate the work that has gone into the bill and everybody bringing it to the board. I want to speak specifically to the consumer protection aspects of it, particularly the deceptive products in the retail environment and how they show up in schools. What I'm seeing daily is that nicotine that the nicotine landscape for young people has changed dramatically. Students are not using traditional tobacco products. They're using vapes, nicotine pouches that are designed to look like something else like people have spoken about. The Bill's language around deceptive products to me is critical. The reality is that many products students are using intentionally are trying to conceal their purpose and appeal to young people. I think that's something that makes it really hard for us at schools to be able to compete with. From a school perspective, it creates a real challenge. But frankly, we're not just addressing use, we're trying to identify products that are built to avoid detection. And I think that's a really difficult thing when you think about teachers and even administrators who I think want to be really helpful and want to know more information. I think the thing that they are constantly doing is coming up to somebody like me and saying, hey, let's participate or I think I might have seen this. And so I think I spend a lot of time just trying to stay up with what the new stuff is and be able to inform them. But I think, frankly, it kinda puts us puts us behind a little bit. I also wanted to speak to the retail and access side because this is where I believe the bill can have the greatest impact. And to do that, I wanted to I wanted to share a story. I worked with a family whose son was struggling with nicotine use. To me, his parents were incredibly engaged. And over the course of more than a year, they contacted online retailers. They blocked deliveries to their house. They worked closely with us to try to cut off access at school because that was another way that they found that he was getting access. And even outside of school, they even tried to identify where he was getting things locally because they found out that he was going to a local retailer and able to purchase them there. And despite all of that, he was still able to consistently access nicotine. And I think that experience is not unique. I think if you talk to many people that are doing my job in other schools, they will have many stories that are very similar. And I think it reflects what I see regularly. Families that are doing everything right while access continues to exist. And from my perspective, nicotine use is not a possession problem, it's an access problem. I think they are able to access it in ways that you just really can't control in any way. And so when products are this available, in many cases designed to appeal to them and evade detection, I think it's really tough for us to expect their behavior to change until we address that. Also wanted to briefly acknowledge the removal of penalties for youth possession because I think that's really important in my work. I feel like punitive responses often just create more barriers, especially because I feel like students become less honest or less likely to be honest and less likely to seek help. I think it becomes much more of a situation where they're really worried about, hey, what are the consequences either from my parents or from the school or largely, could I get in trouble with the police? Something like that. And so I think when we reduce that fear and create more opportunities for early intervention, I think that can actually make a difference. And I just would like to finish with the more we can strengthen the retail environment through consistent compliance and clear expectations and meaningful accountability, I think the more that it supports families and schools and communities who are truly working hard to address the issue. So thank you for the opportunity to speak. And if anybody has any questions, I'm more than happy to answer them.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Thank you, Ben. Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate the work that you do. I am fearful that we could end up going down the path of asking schools to do a lot more. And I know that schools were incredibly impactful in helping change the narrative around cigarettes and cigarette use. And so I'm wondering, so I'm struggling with, do I even ask the question? But I'm wondering, what is being done in health classes today around nicotine? What is and is it effective? We know peer pressure is the thing that is Well, maybe it's not as impactful as the online social media stuff anymore. I really don't know. So I guess maybe that's another question.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: Yeah. So I think vaping and nicotine you've talked about in our health glasses, there's units on it. Think honestly, thing that, so I've been, I think this is my sixth year as the SAP at CBU, and before that, I was a mental health counselor that was working in the school. So I've been at CBU for about eight years. And the thing that I would say has happened over the course of that time is honestly students that are getting to ninth grade have been also getting some conversations about vaping use and nicotine use. By the time they're in ninth grade, I feel like they've been in a position where they're either vaping or open to vaping or not. The decision has kind of already been made by the time that they get into ninth grade. And I think that's a true concern that I have because it puts somebody like me who would love to do probably a little bit more prevention in a situation where I am now trying to help them quit because they've already started. And I think social media is a big part of that. I think Andrea talked about, or somebody mentioned, the ads that they get on social media. That stuff is really difficult. As a part of my time as the baseball coach, we're on a bus for a long time traveling to a lot of places and it'll be really interesting because they're all on TikTok or Instagram and you'll see some similar ads that they will get. And I don't have TikTok or Instagram, but I think a lot of their ads are very similar. Sometimes even the same ad that will pop up on a phone and then it'll go on the next video and the next video. And the next thing you know, you'll have 10 different of the same ads that'll pop up on the phone. And I think it's just because they're in pretty close proximity to each other and all on Instagram. And so I think it's really problematic. And I think that same thing happens to our students that I actually love too.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Is there something, and I think this is probably going back to the mental health counselor, the school mental health counselor association, are there more resources that should be provided to support students. And I hear you write, it's so much younger now, so it's probably different resources. And this is fully out of scope of the bill, but you're here. And I think it's really important to share what we need and what we're not doing to support our kids today that we could be doing.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: Yeah, I mean, I think the more help and the more support that schools can get, I think the better. I feel really lucky to be at a place, to work at a place like CBU does have some social workers who has me as an SAP, which I think having an SAP to me is like a baseline minimum thing that you should have. But truthfully, there's not SAPs in every single school in the state. And so I think I'm really grateful to be at one and then even have one in the community I live in. But I live in Franklin County in Swanton and I've worked in Hinesburg at CVU. And I think when I look at the resources that we have where I live and the resources that we have where I work, it's a big difference. And I'm really grateful to live where I live, but I think they could use some of the same resources that they have where I work. It's just not something that they're able to afford or that they can do. Jonathan, that's actually, I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: think, I'd like you to talk a little bit about your work as a student, as a professional. How many, what's the structure? How many hours

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: a week would you just

[Unidentified Committee Member]: have to give an individual exam that you gave us, which happened like a family was very committed to their child's challenges. Was that something where you had lots of touch points each week? Are these informal, are they more formal, like blocks of time? Because I'm just trying to get my head around what a student's profession will see and how engage and how that happens.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: Yeah, so in the example I used, yeah, for a period of time, that is a lot of me touching base, like multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day, depending on what the situation is or how that person's doing. It's a lot of conversations with the family. And then it might be a situation where the next week it's only us having our one meeting a week. But I think it kind of, I get to, as an SAP, I get to go where I feel like I'm needed. And so what that means is some weeks I may only see a handful of kids or a little over a handful of kids and we're working on some intense things because something happened. And then other weeks I might see 15 or 20 kids come in shorter periods of time. I just think it kind of depends on what's going on and where I'm needed. I think that's one of the things I love about the position and about the role, is I think you're able to kind of be flexible and go where you're needed. Yeah, it's something I feel like I'm pretty good at.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You mentioned that you're just talking about the resources. You live in Swanton. You work in Hinesburg. Mhmm. It sounds like what you're saying is there seems to be a lot more resources in where you live in Swanton than in Hinesburg.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: No. It's the flip side. Okay. There's a lot of Massachusetts in Hinesburg. Can

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you maybe go into a little more detail about what those resources are?

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: Yeah, mean, think even the fact that we have so at CBU, we have two school social workers. We have a clinician that worked, a mental health clinician from the Howard Center that is placed in our building. That was a position I used to have before I took over the SAP and we have an SAP. And so that kind of creates this mental health team. And then we also have mental health providers that come into the building at least once a week that we like fill that caseload up and allow students to see that mental health counselor, especially students who maybe get mental health support somewhere else. And what I know about the school in my district is I believe that there is somebody doing prevention work, but I know that they don't have two school social workers and somebody coming in just to their school from the local mental health organization. I think that there's connection to the local mental health organization, but that's more throughout the district as opposed to, like we have in our district, one Howard Center clinician in every single school. And I think that's a really big thing. And I think those people do really amazing work. And I think what that allows when you have a team is you're able to like figure out the needs that kids have and try to figure out, all right, who's best? It might be you best to support this student. It might be me best to support this student in this situation. But when you don't have a team and when you don't have that number, those numbers, I think it makes it easy to get overwhelmed at some point. And I think sometimes you end up having somebody who maybe isn't best suited to support that person if they're supportive in one way or another.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you very much.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: Yeah, thank you for your time.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Emily, I have a question.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: I'm curious to know about how's, what the level of stress is, or if you're seeing stress as being a factor for young people starting these vape products and pouches? And also, are you seeing an increase of stress post COVID?

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: Yeah, so I think that's really interesting. I think stress is one of the, I think the main things that you'll hear students talk about and I think stress for a lot of different reasons. It could be academic, it could be just family stress, it could be stress about social relationships and things like that. So I do think stress is a huge one. The interesting part to me about some of the nicotine pouches is I see those a lot in men, or boys, even at the high school level. And I feel like the interesting part that I've seen with those as well is with those boys, I think some of them have heard vaping, especially for athletes. I communicate with a lot of athletes, I think they hear that vape or no, vaping obviously isn't good for them because smoking and inhaling things isn't good for your lungs. And so that's almost used as a way of like, oh, I can use nicotine, but not get the negative side effects of using the vape. And so I think that is something that, I know I started with it, but I'm really concerned about what that's going to look like, because I think that is to me the next thing that's going to blow up because of how discreet it is and because of how it just ranges from three. And like I said, I've seen 50 which aren't sold here in America but are accessible. And so I think those are type, those, that's an example of something that I feel like in two years from now, it's going to be ubiquitous if I'm not careful.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Thank you. Thank you for that. Also, I was just on the internet looking at these high concentration pouches and saw thirty milligram ones. It was $45 for a pack of 10, for 10 packs of them, 10 tins of them. It's very, very alarming.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: Yeah, it's pretty cheap. You

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: very We're saying we have a letter from students from On X oh, eight OBX. Oh, yes. Yeah. So we will scan it, we'll post that as well on our web page so everybody can Awesome. See the letter to the committee. And We appreciate your students' input as well. Thank you very much. Thank you. Amy?

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Good morning. So, morning, everybody. Thanks for having me here. My name is Amy Brewer. I coordinate the Franklin Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention Policy and what that means.

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: I'm a Department of Health funded and I do everything I can to support anybody who's ready to quit with all the resources they need to do that. We have policies that protect people from taking out smoke. Then lately, all I do is do everything I can to prevent young people from ever becoming addicted. So that's kind of why I'm here to share. I've kind of prepared a statement,

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: but we've talked about a lot

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: of these things today. So I'm going read fast, but ask me any questions that you want, including I brought my fucking bakes. So I've been doing the coalition work for the past twenty years. In my time in the O, I've seen the use of cigarettes among young people decrease, saw the finish line, it was within reach, and that goalpost moved far. So when I started this job in 2005, 19% of Franklin County High School students used cigarettes in the past thirty days, so 19%. And in 2023, that got down to 5%. Wow, that was the goalpost that I saw. We're there, we're getting there. But in 2023, oddly enough, it's nineteen percent of Franklin County high school students are vaping. And so what we have is the same level of nicotine use among our young people with all those unknown health So the progress we've made with smoking decrease feels very erased. I speak to middle school and high schoolers regularly throughout the Franklin Grand Island region, almost exclusively middle schoolers. So to Matt's point, that's the space where I think young people need the most information and the most support making healthy decisions. So that's where I focus my time. What they tell me, they're trying these products and to Emily's point, that products help with stress, anxiety and depression. Universally, they articulated no matter what classroom I'm in, will tell me that that's why people use these products. They say they try them because they're curious about them, they think they're cool and because of peer pressure. Those are the top reasons young people are telling me. Recently a student said it looks like fun. So what they struggle, middle school student long term thinking is hard developmentally, they struggle to understand how quickly addiction happens and that this is a long term relationship that they're developing with this product. And so they also struggle to understand that the user holds all the harm and the corporations who create these products hold all the benefits. That's a hard concept for them. We talk about it. I will also share, and this has come up this morning, the Vermont Department of Health released its 2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance survey data, that's adult data. And in that eighty eight percent of Vermonters' ages 18 to 24 who are already using these products were trying to quit. And that is a usually it's, have you tried to quit in past year? It's usually like between forty and 60. But that particular age group is really

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: working hard

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: already to try to quit these products, which just shocked me. We talked about students are seeing ads through these products online, TikTok, other social media, and on YouTube.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: I want to talk a

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: little bit about influencers. They see peers or other people who intrigue them using these products. And then there's the reward program. And I don't know if you've all heard of Noah Khan. I assume we all heard of Noah Khan. Did a Zen reward concert in Colorado last October.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Or

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: And so for people who are engaged in the ZYN reward program, they could win tickets to go see no con concert just for ZYN reward members.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: So

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: I also want to talk a little bit about convenience stores. So when I go into a convenience store, I'm a mom of two kids, I'm busy, I'm distracted. Usually I'm going to convenience stores because I'm out of milk. Right? And I know that's somewhat of a thing that happens to people. So I run out of milk, I run into the convenience store, I scan, I go right to the milk department and run out my milk, right? I mean, look at the price because if I don't have milk for my coffee. So I run to the store and I say, hi, nice to see you, thank you so much. I take my milk, I run to my car and I go home to walk the dog. That's kind of a parent story I hear. My young people, when they go into convenience store, they don't have a lot of places where they can go and exercise independence and a little bit of consumerism. There's convenience stores located near schools regularly, oftentimes a lot. They go in and they hang out. They're looking at the products, right? And maybe they're not paying attention to all the products the first time they're there, but they go regularly because that's where they can go. So they're seeing the exposure to the products over and over and over again. Jill's picture of that wall of product, it's really colorful and it's really intriguing. So when I'm getting in and getting out, I'm not paying attention while I pay attention, but I'm really not focused on everything else, but you can see that. And that's part of their daily view. So advertising and product packaging absolutely makes a difference for youth in that environment. I also wanna touch a little bit about nicotine and stress and sleep. So we talk a lot about the mental health of our young people. We want them have really great, strong mental health. These products regularly market as help in reducing stress, anxiety and depression. Nicotine actually exacerbates stress and anxiety. It's a stimulant, it's increasing your heart rate, it's increasing your respiration and it's causing withdrawal. So one of the things that I do when I go into a middle school is we talk about withdrawal, what does withdrawal feel like? Well, you're anxious, you can't focus, you're fidgety, you're yelling at the people next to you, your parents, everybody's in your way, right? Until you give your brain a dose of nicotine and those feelings go away. But those feelings are very similar to stress. So young people are feeling those stress feelings and then nicotine makes them go away. So helping them identify that that's withdrawal. That's part of the addiction process. You're not curing your stress, you're actually adding to it. And then we unique to young people, if you can imagine being a young person sitting in a classroom and you're addicted, you've used this product, addiction happens pretty fast for these products. And so young people are sitting there thinking, I'm having a craving. Where can I get it? Who has it? How do I get it? How do I hide it? Where do I meet this person? There's cell phone ban in some schools until next year and then it's all schools, but how do I connect with the person and how do I hide it? And are my peers or my parents or my teachers gonna be disappointed in me? So there's all those factors that just really amp up that stress related to these products. Nicotine also interrupts sleep, which we talk about with middle schoolers all the time. Sleep is really important for Sleep is really important for young people in learning and mental health and development and growth and all that kind of stuff, nicotine and other substances interrupt sleep. So not only are they sitting in class feeling cravings and withdrawal symptoms, having trouble focusing and feeling stressed, the more interruption they have in their sleep, the more likely they are in a disaster. I want to share that as well. And then I want to end with, I shouldn't end. I brought a bucket of vapes. The reason I brought a bucket of vapes, which was surprisingly a little bit hard to get through security,

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: was It's good to know. So

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: anyway, we are piloting in Franklin making a file collection process to help save disposal of these products. So these are confiscated products that I am bringing to Northwest Solid Waste to dispose of. Each one costs between $3 and $5 to dispose of appropriately and solid waste is currently paying for that. In my pilot, I'm using grant funds to pay for it. Soon the natural resources process will figure out a way to do that, But it gives us a look at what's being confiscated, what are the flavors, who's using what. None of the things that we collected in my bucket are on the FDA authorized list, not one. So I want to share a word about that. So what we end up with are intriguing tech forward flavored products that are marketed and advertised in places where young people spend time. They give them messages about stress, anxiety, being cool, fitting in. Like with the pouches, we're

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: seeing healthier wellness marketing,

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: especially to our athletes. So for many who experiment with nicotine at an early age, they end up with a long term expensive addiction that impacts their physical, mental and financial health, all the while increasing Vermont's healthcare and headache costs. We already saw that that's extremely expensive for us as a culture to pay for the harm caused by those products. Looks like Matt and myself and all of our colleagues around the state are doing all we can at the local level, high school level to county level, statewide level, but we continue to need your help with all the policies that come. Thank you for letting me come in here and entertain you before, I got a lot more before lunch, so thank you.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you, questions?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I don't know how much is a question. It's a statement, I don't know. But first, snarkier remark, of course, the milk for your caffeine addiction. I

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: think that's

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: an absolutely fair question. And might I say that we talk about that with students. The difference between a caffeine addiction and a nicotine addiction is big. And my coffee is half decaf. I will share, I just really like coffee,

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: but it's a fair

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: comparison. And the industry is really trying to say nicotine is kind of like caffeine, but not.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: That's not fair.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Look, it also occurred to me when I was looking at the products and the self products, mean, certainly I get to hide it from parents.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: But for me also, it occurred to

[Unidentified Committee Member]: me that in future of being a teenager is to try and get away with stuff. And so what an amazingly smart marketing strategy. How do you address that?

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: We're asking you I to mean,

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: that's the part that we need help with. I think it's tools, and I'm sure you guys are getting this in your school, how do you break down an advertisement? How do you figure out that they're target targeting you? How do you break that apart? But that's where we need the regulations to give power to that. Well, you can't do that. The MSA has been hugely impactful to get rid of Joe Camel. But now we have, this one has a little bit of holograph, you

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: can poke them out. What's that? I want some pseudo. I don't think So they're discreet,

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: some of them are really not discreet. They're huge and chunky, and they light up if you touch them. Most of them are off now so that they don't explode.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It costs $3.5 to dispose

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: of those.

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: What Northwest Solid Waste District told me is it's between $3 and $5 to dispose of them because they have to contract with a separate company. Not all the solid waste districts do. So I was lucky enough to have one in my backyard, partner. Because nicotine is a poison and hazardous waste, you have the lithium ion batteries, and you can't easily separate that unless there is an explosion.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So we oops, can touch that. So we currently do deposits on bottles, and we do them on car batteries.

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: There is a law. We have tire disposal fees. We this in different ways. I'm

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: wondering if

[Unidentified Committee Member]: that is something that we should consider.

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: There is already a law that the agency of natural resources is working in.

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: You can never remember, it's

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: something SPR It is a law in which the producer, producer responsibility, where the producer will have to pay for the disposal of them. The logistics are being worked out now. So it hasn't gone into effect, because as for all the reasons we talked about, the producers are kind of whack a mole in part. So they're working on that there is a law, it's just we're not done yet.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I'll just get back to the education piece I a little remember, I'm middle aged, so this is back a while. I remember in fifth grade watching a movie where they took some sort of commercial with a toy, and all kids are excited and the music's going on and then they broke it down and said, well this is what's really going on and completely took the thrill out of it. Is there some program or something where maybe we can get them? And that was like a fifth grade, and it seems to me like if we could take some of these ads for these vapes and things like that and say, okay, let's break this down. This is what's really going on, if that would help.

[Amy Brewer (Franklin–Grand Isle Tobacco Prevention, Dept. of Health–funded)]: That happens periodically. As you can imagine, schools are busy and not all schools have a team of folks who can pop in and feed that. I do that bits and pieces. That's my number two day when I'm talking about tobacco and nicotine. Generally, I get to only one day, I get a 40 and many middle schools to talk about it, but rarely do I get to go in for day number two where we talk about the There is a lot that schools cover and are responsible for. There are great curriculums, some schools are definitely doing that, but it is really hard to combat that in a forty minute lesson when they're being bombarded with those ads in ways that we are talking about, I'm not seeing those ads, you're not either, younger people might be seeing, they know they're seeing ads that are different than ours, so it's hard. It's really complicated, it's happening. It's happening universally.

[Matt Vigne (Student Assistance Program Counselor, Champlain Valley Union HS)]: And I'm an ex smoker,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: so I totally get the addiction part of this.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: Thank you

[Jill Sudhoff-Guerin (Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Vermont)]: very much. I love being here. I'm a pretty safe place. Everyone's You're

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: from what school? Well, Well, thank you for joining us.

[Dr. Andrea C. Villanti (Rutgers Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies)]: From Main Street in Burlington.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you for coming.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: Yeah. I just visited with kids what's your Twin Pit? No. We just did a program in your school about tobacco and addiction. I think I met you two there, right?

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I'm glad you came. Hope this was good information for you on how we as lawmakers are trying to understand what's going on, especially for you, and how we can help protect you from nicotine and smoking and all the issues that go along with it. I hope it was helpful to you, and thank you for coming. Okay. Was very informational morning. So, Jen, you know that there's some info that detailed health matters, we've made some changes, and also, I think the EDs are fifty's. You could incorporate those and let us know when that's ready, and next week we'll take another look at it, maybe move this out so we can get to the other committees. Great. Thank you.

[Rose (Vermont Attorney General’s Office, Tobacco Enforcement)]: I have the list of the vapes and nicotine pouches that are FDA authorized, if that's helpful to you, so you can see compared to what you would see in a store.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Right. That would be great. Thank you. So committee, we're on the floor at one. I'm here at 02:30. We have Beth Cindy Dave coming in with a new draft of h three one three, which is actually going to be pieces that we've put into the previous field. Any questions?