According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America's teens loooove e-cigs. They are trying them at a rapidly increasing rate and reporting that yeah, vaping is chill. CDC figures released today show that over 250,000 youths tried e-cigs last year, which is triple the number of kids who tried them in 2011.

While the jury's still out on the health risks e-cigs actually pose, the CDC does not think teen vaping is "good." Rebecca Bunnell, the associate director for science at the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, told the Associated Press,

The increasing number of young people who use e-cigarettes should be a concern for parents and the public health community. Especially since youth e-cigarette users were nearly twice as likely to have intentions to smoke conventional cigarettes compared with youth who had never tried e-cigarettes.

Based on the CDC's data, e-cigs are a gateway drug to real cigs.

While this study is bad news for teens and the people who love them, it is great news for e-cig marketers, who have been allowed to push e-cigs on kids with wild abandon. (E-cigs currently aren't regulated on the U.S. market.) At left, you can see an example of an ostensibly successful ad for Blu e-cigs, which was published in Sports Illustrated.