A recent study shows American teenagers are easily able to purchase e-cigarettes online.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina revealed just how incredibly easy it is for teenagers to buy electronic cigarettes online. They found out that just five out of 98 attempts by teenagers to purchase e-cigarettes from online retailers were thwarted by an age-verification mechanism.

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Researcher Rebecca Williams and her colleagues enlisted 11 non-smoking minors between the ages of 14 and 17 to make supervised e-cigarette purchases from 98 Internet e-cigarette vendors. The minors successfully placed 75 orders.

According to the findings, Out of 23 unsuccessful orders, only five were rejected for age verification, which means 93.7 percent of e-cigarette vendors failed to properly verify their customers' ages.

The delivered packages of e-cigarettes also came from shipping companies that shouldn't ship cigarettes to consumers according to company policy or federal regulation. None of the vendors complied with North Carolina's e-cigarette age-verification law.

Williams explained that 35 percent of the e-cig vendors asked for date of birth, name and address to verify the customers' age in a public records database, but most of the time this didn't help.

Forty-one states ban the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, but there is no federal ban in place.

"In the absence of federal regulation, youth e-cigarette use has increased and e-cigarette sellers online operate in a regulatory vacuum, using few, if any, efforts to prevent sales to minors. Even in the face of state laws like North Carolina's requiring age verification, most vendors continue to fail to even attempt to verify age in accordance with the law, underscoring the need for careful enforcement," the study concludes.

The findings of the study were published in the journal The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics.

Tagse-cigarettes, E-cigarettes online, e-cig, teens smoking E-cigarettes, minors E-cigarettes, age-verification mechanism, online e-cig