Dangers of children smoking cigarettes and using tobacco products have long been a problem, not only at home, but also in school.

But even as tobacco use is on the decline, the bad habits are not going away. Instead, they have dwarfed in the modern era to the use of e-cigarettes by our kids, often in school.

That’s why we praise local school districts, especially Liberty Local Schools, for taking steps to not only monitor and stop the usage, but in Liberty’s case, to hold manufacturers accountable in attempts to raise their level of awareness and curb any attempts to reel in more kids to the risks and long-term dangers of vaping.

“Every district is plagued by smoking, vaping and more,” Liberty Superintendent Andrew Tommelleo recently told our reporter. “It’s an ongoing challenge to detect and eliminate it. We have always faced smoking, and then it eventually morphed into vaping. Kids know where adults are and where they’re not, so we have to stay as vigilant as we can.”

Liberty Local Schools is stepping up to try to end this trend by becoming part of a class action civil suit lauched in 2021 against vape companies such as Juul. A string of settlements reached in the suit will go to school districts nationwide, including Liberty.

Good.

We hope those settlements are used to help educate our kids about the dangers and deter them through use of electronic sensors and other efforts to find and confiscate such products.

We know the dangers of any tobacco use are real — no matter how small the amount, by anyone, let alone among young users with still developing brains and bodies.

One big attraction, especially to youngsters, is the flavors offered by the vape manufacturers.

We are not naive enough to think that kids — all humans, really — will experiment with products like e-cigarettes.

In fact, a 2021 survey backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that more than 1 in 3 Ohio high schoolers have tried vaping, and nearly 1 in 5 students currently vape.

We believe there is a way to lower the number of kids that go back to the habit after the initial experiment. Frankly, we believe that fewer kids will go back to vaping if the products carried the less-than-favorable taste of tobacco.

Flavored tobacco products, if not outright banned, must never be sold to minors in Ohio. State legislators must protect our youth by aggressively going after companies targeting them with flavored e-cigarettes, more commonly known as vapes, and imposing stiffer penalties on businesses who sell these products to kids.

It’s clear that state lawmakers need to put more teeth in Ohio law to discourage retailers from selling flavored tobacco products to minors. We support state Rep. Sara Carruthers’ recently introduced bill that would increase fines ($250 for a first offense up to $1,500 for a fifth offense) and label repeat offenders “public nuisances,” which would make them eligible for closure. This seems to be the lowest hanging fruit to crack down on the “bad apples” responsible for selling to kids.

But it doesn’t address the problems with enforcement now.

The most effective remedy, however, is to ban flavored tobacco products, including menthol. Eighty-five percent of teens who vape use flavored products, and a recent OSU study found 71% of youth age 14-21 would quit vaping if tobacco was the only flavor available. A federal ban on flavored vape cartridges enacted under former President Donald Trump hasn’t kept them out of the market. That ban exempted flavored liquid nicotine and menthol- and tobacco-flavored products.

Liberty Local Schools is on the right track to help hold vape companies accountable.

Our legislature also needs to make similar decisions to keep the products from continuing to fall into young hands.