Your Vape Wants to Know How Old You Are

Flavored vapes are everywhere. The US Food and Drug Administration heavily restricted the products for a variety of reasons, including the fact that their colorful, sweet-flavored appeal was a deliberate effort to market them directly to children.

But in early March, the Food and Drug Administration released draft guidance, or “nonbinding recommendations,” about what it would take for flavored vapes to be approved in the US. The main requirement would be for nicotine companies to verify their user’s age directly on the device. That is something e-cigarette companies have struggled with for a decade or more.

Now, a company thinks it has solved the problem and says it is in active talks with the FDA to bring the technology to market.

Ike Tech is a partnership between Ispire Technology, a vape manufacturer that makes cartridges, e-cigarettes, and batteries, and Chemular, a regulatory consulting company that specializes in the nicotine market. Announced earlier this month, the goal of Ike Tech is to use biometric data and blockchain as security for age-verification measures built directly into the cartridge of a disposable vape.

Vape Nation

The vape market in the US is overwhelmingly flooded with cheap but potent disposable vapes from overseas. Because they’re not regulated, just about anyone can get hold of them. Lack of regulation also means they aren’t properly inspected for chemical components that have adverse effects, such as nickel, lead, or other chemicals that can make them more toxic than regular cigarettes.

Ispire CEO Michael Wang wants to counter those “irresponsible players” and “questionable actors” who he says “are only in it to make money.” His hope for this age-verification tech is that it opens the market for flavored vapes to be made and sold in the US and go through proper FDA inspection.

“By making the device a different color, light up in the dark, and even almost like a game console design, it's really targeting underage people,” Wang says. “We are hoping that with age gating, the FDA could finally approve fruit-flavored devices that are safe.”

Many of the big nicotine companies have worked on age-verification tech for years, including Juul, British American Tobacco, and Altria. But those methods tend to rely on collecting personal information from users in a way that can make privacy a problem, or they use chips on devices that store info and have the potential to be hacked.

“The industry has been selling this stuff for a decade now,” says Stanton Glantz, a former University of California, San Francisco professor and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. “Age-verification tech has never been shown to work.”

Breath of the Vialed

Ike’s solution is to leverage blockchain technology in the chip on the e-cig cartridge. It would use a camera to scan some form of ID and then also take a video of the user’s face. Once it verifies your identity and determines you’re old enough to vape, it translates that information into anonymized tokens. That info goes to an identity service like ID.me or Clear. If approved, it bounces back to the app, which then uses a Bluetooth signal to give the vape the OK to turn on.

“Everything is tokenized,” Wang says. “As a result of this process, we don't communicate consumer personal private information.”

He says the process takes about a minute and a half. (Which will probably feel like forever if you’re jonesing for your next puff.) After that onetime check, the Bluetooth connection on the phone will recognize when the vape cartridge is nearby and keep it unlocked. Move the vape too far away from the phone, and it shuts off again.

Based on testing, the companies behind Ike Tech claim this process has a 100 percent success rate in age verification, more or less calling the tech infallible. “The FDA told us it's the holy grail technology they were looking for,” Wang says. “That's word-for-word what they said when we met with them.” The FDA did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

But Glantz is not at all convinced these protections will work.

“The FDA is just showing their pro-industry bias,” Glantz says. “If I were running the FDA, I would prohibit these devices from having any Bluetooth capability at all, period. There are just too many ways it could go south. Every technical fix has a work-around.”

The verification features would be tied to just one person, so when the vape is on, that person could share a puff with anyone nearby without verifying their age. At that point, Wang says it comes down to personal responsibility.

“You really have to count on the responsibility of that person,” Wang says. “If it's a 21-year-old or older person, of course, that's fine, but if you really want to hand it to an underage person, then you are really irresponsible.”

Wang says the goal is to implement additional features in the verification process, like geo-fencing, which would force the vape to shut off while near a school or on an airplane. In the future, the plan is to license this biometric verification tech to other e-cig companies. The tech may also grow to include fingerprint readers and expand to other product categories; Wang suggests guns, which have a long history of age-verification features not quite working.

Vapor Ware

The time frame for when Ike Tech might actually be out in the world—and how much it will cost when added to vape cartridges—is still hazy. Wang says there are already partnerships with two nicotine companies, but won’t say which or when that will emerge. “In 2026, there will be a clear indication of when our solution will be approved and how many other brands will license our technology.”

Wang’s ideal version of a vape, he posits, would be a safe, clean way to inhale nicotine.

“In the industry, we have a saying: ‘Nicotine never killed a single person,’” Wang says. “To a large degree, e-cigarettes are a safer way to consume nicotine.”

Glantz rejects that notion by bringing up practices like “smoking topography,” where nicotine companies track how smokers puff the product differently, then control how much nicotine is dispersed at a time to maximize the addictive potential.

He also takes issue with the fundamental problem that e-cigarettes and vapes are cleaner than traditional cigarettes at all. While the problem with cigarettes and cheap vapes might be the other chemicals, nicotine itself is not a harmless substance.

“You can't make a healthy e-cigarette; it's impossible,” Glantz says. “It’s true that nicotine isn’t a carcinogen, but it has all kinds of adverse cardiovascular effects. Nicotine screws up your nervous system.”

For nicotine to be absorbed as vapor, it has to be reduced to ultrafine particles. That’s what the heating does, and those particles can have all sorts of adverse health effects.

“There are all of these other implications that are extremely serious that nobody's really thinking about,” Glantz says. “Even if the age-verification thing worked, it's still not worth it.”