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The Risks of Another Epidemic: Teenage Vaping

SnapDragon NY

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/risks-another-epidemic-teenage-vaping-195234174.html

While most of us strive to avoid inhaling aerosols that could harbor a deadly virus, millions of teens and young adults are deliberately bathing their lungs in aerosols rich in chemicals with known or suspected health hazards.

I’m referring to vaping (or “juuling”): the use of electronic cigarettes that is hooking young people on a highly addictive drug — nicotine — and will be likely to keep them hooked for decades. Meanwhile, e-cigarettes and other vaping devices are legally sold with few restrictions while producers and sellers reap the monetary rewards. Although many states prohibit e-cigarette sales to persons younger than 18 or 21, youngsters have little trouble accessing the products online or from friends and relatives.

In just one year, from 2017 to 2018, vaping by high school seniors increased more than “for any substance we’ve ever monitored in 45 years, and the next year it rose again almost as much,” said Richard Miech, principal investigator for the national survey Monitoring the Future.



By 2019, one-quarter of 12th graders were vaping nicotine, nearly half of them daily. Daily vaping rose in all three grades surveyed — eighth, 10th and 12th — “with accompanying increases in the proportions of youth who are physically addicted to nicotine,” Miech and colleagues reported in The New England Journal of Medicine last year.

Although self-reported use of e-cigarettes by high school and middle school students decreased over the past year, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cautioned, “Youth e-cigarette use remains an epidemic.”

“We’re stepping backward from all the advances we’ve made in tobacco control,” Miech, professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, said in an interview. “I’m worried that we will eventually return to the tobacco situation of yore. There’s evidence that kids who vape are four to five times more likely the next year to experiment with cigarettes for the first time.”

As someone who witnessed the persuasive tactics the tobacco industry used to get nearly half of American adults hooked on regular cigarettes in the 1950s, I see similar efforts being used today to promote these new delivery systems for nicotine: sex, glamour, endorsements by celebrities and doctors, and sponsorship of popular sports and musical events. Only now there are even more pervasive avenues of influence through websites and social media.

In 2016, ads for e-cigarettes reached nearly 4 in 5 middle and high school students in the United States, Dr. Ellen S. Rome said.

As in decades past, the nation’s regulatory agencies have been slow — some say negligent — to recognize this fast-growing threat to the health and development of young Americans. Rome, a pediatrician who heads the Center for Adolescent Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, explained that nicotine forms addictive pathways in the brain that can increase a youngster’s susceptibility to addiction throughout life. The adolescent brain is still developing, she told me, and e-cigarette use is often a gateway to vaping of mxxxxxxxx, which can affect the brain centers responsible for attention, memory, learning, cognition, self-control and decision-making.

In a review published last December in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, Rome and her co-author, Perry Dinardo, challenged the public perception that vaping is harmless, or “at least less harmful than cigarette smoking.”

While it’s likely to be true that vaping may be less hazardous than tobacco cigarettes, since the vaped aerosols that reach the lungs are devoid of the thousands of tobacco-derived toxic and carcinogenic substances inhaled by cigarette smokers, vaping still introduces a fair share of potentially harmful chemicals. In addition to nicotine, some of the chemicals, like the carcinogen formaldehyde, are created when the nicotine-rich liquid in some vaping devices is heated to high temperatures.

“E-cigarettes might have their own unique health effects we haven’t discovered yet,” said Theodore L. Wagener, director of the Center for Tobacco Research at Ohio State University. “Although compared to tobacco cigarettes, e-cigarettes without a doubt expose users to much lower levels of harmful chemicals, we still don’t know how the body handles them and what their long-term effects might be.”

Remember, it took many decades of smoking by tens of millions of people before the deadly hazards of tobacco cigarettes were recognized.

The surge in the use of electronic cigarettes was tied to a game-changing product, Juul, a cartridge device introduced in 2017 in a slew of enticing flavors. Flavors especially attractive to youngsters are now banned from use in closed-system devices like Juul, which now is sold only in tobacco and menthol flavors, but can still be used in the open-system products sold in vape shops. And now, taking advantage of a loophole in regulations, a disposable product called Puff Bar, which comes in more than 20 flavors, has replaced Juul as the vape of choice among young people.

Concerns about vaping grew after a 2019 outbreak of severe lung injuries, which were subsequently linked to vitamin E acetate, an additive found in some vaping devices that deliver Txx, the psychoactive ingredient in Mxxxxxxxx . Juul pods are not designed to be refillable with substances like Txx or other chemicals.
( edited for words we cannot use on the forum)

Producers of Juul introduced changes that enhanced the palatability and safety of vaping, but at the same time “made it easier for kids to start using nicotine,” Wagener said. Instead of freebase nicotine that is very harsh to inhale, Juul contains a nicotine salt, “a very palatable form of nicotine that makes inhaling high doses of nicotine easy,” he explained. And Juul doesn’t require the high temperatures that produce toxic substances like formaldehyde. A single pod contains the nicotine equivalent of a pack of conventional cigarettes.

“Juul made it cool, and young people who had never smoked cigarettes are becoming addicted to nicotine,” said Erika R. Cheng, a public health researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine. In addition to nicotine, Juul pods contain a mix of glycerol, propylene glycol, benzoic acid and flavoring agents, the long-term health effects of which have yet to be determined, she said.

“E-cigarettes were initially advertised as a means to help people transition from harmful tobacco smoking,” Cheng said. “A lot of early users didn’t even know they contained nicotine.” Although a small minority of smokers have used e-cigarettes to help them quit or reduce their dependence on tobacco, most who use the devices vape to get their nicotine fix when they can’t smoke regular cigarettes.

Although there have been calls for bans on e-cigarettes, Abigail S. Friedman, a health economist at Yale University School of Public Health, cautioned that “bans can push people into the black market looking for something that can be acutely dangerous.”

Friedman said that rather than outright bans that can have unanticipated costs, she favors better regulations. Currently, other than flavors, what is inhaled from e-cigarettes is unregulated. Still, she and other experts are very concerned about the explosive uptake of vaping by young people. In the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 4.9 million high school students, she said, 6% reported smoking conventional cigarettes while 33% puffed e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. In December 2018, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams, declared e-cigarette use by youth an epidemic.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company
 

MyMagicMist

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Me too- the 1st article I saw on my Yahoo home page this morning- ugh!
It never ends with these stupid reporters and articles.

Wonder what would happen if people told on these reporters to their moms & dads? "Your kid helps propagate fear."

In fairness, I'm not belittling any actual real problem of children misusing vaping stuff. In my view, that also stems back to a parental issue.

No one listens even if they hear. No one wants to listen. It's a vicious cycle needing dissected. See no way to do it because frankly human nature will always be human nature.

No, not surrendering. I am accepting it is beyond my means to control as an individual save individually. Will do what I'm able but so much lies beyond myself.

Unfortunately for some I cannot simply say, "well some entity will sort it out." I can not in good consciousness say any entity exists or doesn't. So, I don't rely on any entities any further than the sun rising daily. Still think that happens because I smile on waking. ;) :)
 
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I remember my last high school years - every second child was vaping. I have not even tried and I perceive it as an adolescent's struggle with personal worth, since everybody knows that smoking is a way to run away from problems...
 

SteveS45

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troll-detected-radar-45b7.gif
 

5150sick

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What? No kid smoking? Do you joke since they do that and love vapes
So you are replying to yourself now? :facepalm:

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i don't know which part of "against the rules" that you are having trouble with.
Respond with which account you want TODAY or we can make them both vanish

You troll/spam shitbags must really think we are stupid even though you are the one's who don't know shit about vaping or working the internet.
Everyone has already clearly spotted the dumbass in every thread that you posted in.

The average active forum member is way smarter than you and has the ability to spot spammers and trolls almost instantly.
You aren't outsmarting anyone here.
 

ajvapes

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So you are replying to yourself now? :facepalm:

View attachment 194968

i don't know which part of "against the rules" that you are having trouble with.
Respond with which account you want TODAY or we can make them both vanish

You troll/spam shitbags must really think we are stupid even though you are the one's who don't know shit about vaping or working the internet.
Everyone has already clearly spotted the dumbass in every thread that you posted in.

The average active forum member is way smarter than you and has the ability to spot spammers and trolls almost instantly.
You aren't outsmarting anyone here.
👋
👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋👋
 
I don't believe parents forbid vaping so strictly because I know parents who are vaping. On the one hand, I judge teens who don't listen to all their parents and do nonsense with their life; on the other hand - I don't support parental involvement in their teen's life. So, it's a dilemma. the information from because it is the So, adolescents should have independent and struggle to overcome various obstacles and tragedies in their life. I see this as a unique way to develop a sense of personal worth.

Moderator removed a recently added link
 
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Vape Fan

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That dilemma is quite the development.
 

Carambrda

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I don't believe parents would forbid vaping so strictly 'cause I know ParentS who are vaping. On the one hand, I judge teens who don't listen to all their parents and do nonsense with their life; on the other hand - I don't support parental involvement in their teen's life. So, it's a dilemma.
I support moral education as a necessary means to help pave the road that might lead to practical solutions. To build on ethics in a structural, hierarchical way to be able to improve, and to be improved, is always a bigger challenge compared to letting these values decay and to letting them be ignored, or worse, to choosing to ignore them, and, things like condemnation, persistent taboos and toxic positivity never work, only true guidance can work─and usually does work at least in absence of such disturbing elements. Now I must go back to channeling my Kundalini powers. 😶‍🌫️
 

Lady Sarah

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Kids will be kids. They steal cars to joyride in. They steal guns to go shoot. They steal booze to party with. Making age limits just don't cut it.

Banning things outright won't work either. They tried banning liquor in the US back in the 1920s. All that did was create a very lucrative black market. You can bet your socks that it didn't stop kids from getting drunk.
 

nadalama

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Kids will be kids. They steal cars to joyride in. They steal guns to go shoot. They steal booze to party with. Making age limits just don't cut it.

Banning things outright won't work either. They tried banning liquor in the US back in the 1920s. All that did was create a very lucrative black market. You can bet your socks that it didn't stop kids from getting drunk.

It didn't stop ADULTS from getting drunk, either. Just like laws haven't kept people of all ages from getting high-and/or-addicted all these years.

My head is still spinning, though, from the statement that someone doesn't "support" parental involvement in teenagers' lives. Spoken like a true teenager - who else would even SAY that? Maybe someone who's never had or observed teenage kids?
 

Carambrda

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The pope is in Canada right now trying to explain that mass raping the kids don't cut it either. Be reasonable, and, be reasonable even if it's hard to be reasonable or if you still can't, PM me so that you can then book an appointment. :p
 

Carambrda

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Great, gise. Now all I just wanna is to vape high fructose corn syrup flavored juice.
 

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