Enter the e-cigarette
A “smokeless, nontobacco cigarette” was patented in the United States in 1965, but the version that has more recently taken the world by storm was developed and introduced in China in 2004 and arrived in the U.S. not long thereafter. A variety of devices and brands of e-cigarettes (the “e” for “electronic”) have entered the marketplace since 2010 and have spread like (smokeless) wildfire.
E-cigarettes originally looked like cigarettes, but they have morphed into dozens of shapes and sizes. They all consist of a battery, a heating element and a liquid that is vaporized and inhaled. The liquid is water that normally contains flavoring, vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol (both of which disperse the other ingredients and create vapor when heated) — and variable amounts of nicotine. Variations in these components — along with different features, colors and styles — can dramatically impact the appeal and sales of e-cigarette devices.
Statistics about use
The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s 2018 “Monitoring the Future” survey of U.S. eighth, 10th and 12th graders reported some grim statistics. The percentage of high school seniors who said they had used vaping devices in the prior month nearly doubled between 2017 (11%) and 2018 (20.9%). Roughly one in 10 eighth graders (10.9%) reported that they had vaped in the past year.
Translated into raw numbers, that represents more than 3.5 million American middle and high school students vaping in 2018. Ask the administrators at your local high school and you will almost certainly hear that vaping — in class, in the rest rooms, inside and outside school grounds — has become a major disciplinary issue.
So what’s wrong with kids vaping? Let us count the ways:
Long-term impact
While inhaling flavored water vapor is generally recognized as less harmful than inhaling smoke, no one really knows what may be the long-term impact — on airways, lungs and the overall body — of repeated exposure to the compounds emitted by e-cigarettes. Kids and adults with asthma are likely to have their symptoms aggravated by inhaling e-cigarette vapor, for example, but that may be the tip of an iceberg whose size and destructive potential will not be recognized until decades have passed.
Lung disease
Several devastating and even lethal cases of acute lung disease linked to vaping have made headlines during the summer of 2019. No infectious organism (bacteria or virus) has been isolated as a cause, and investigators now speculate that a contaminant in some home-grown, street-purchased vaping products containing cannabinoids (marijuana’s active components) may provoke an intense reaction in the lung.
Kids’ exposure
The repeated exposure of young brains to nicotine is widely understood to be harmful. A series of “Flavors Hook Kids” commercials sponsored by the California Department of Public Health’s “TobaccoFreeCA” program vividly depicts kids with various states of agitation, isolation, learning difficulties, headaches and mood swings, all linked to the nicotine they are inhaling through their vaping devices. The tagline: “Nicotine = Brain Poison” is not a hyperbole. Nicotine is not a benign substance, especially for a young brain.
Speaking of young brains, the adolescent/young adult brain is still growing and maturing until about age 25. Not only does this affect judgment and risk-taking, but it also means that teenagers and young adults are more prone to addiction than older adults. For a real-world check, ask any long-term smoker (especially one who has had difficulty quitting) when he or she got started. You will invariably hear that it was during their teen years — or earlier. Very few people start smoking when they are 35 years old and have a spouse, kids and career.