It was news to me, and possibly it will be to many Leader readers.
“Vaping” – the practice of using a handheld battery-powered vaporizer to simulate smoking without burning tobacco – has risen to epidemic status among teenagers around the world, including right here in Jefferson County, Mo.
The Leader’s Teen Advisory Board relayed that disturbing information a few months ago to the newspaper’s two Peggys (see adjacent staff box) during a planning meeting for our third special report by and about teenagers.
First, the oldsters had to demonstrate our ignorance, and then our novice reporters took on the job of dispelling it.
Clearly, our kids were worried, both about the scope of the problem and the difficulties they would face in trying to report about it.
You see, multitudes of their peers are “vaping,” but since it is against the law in Missouri for people under 18 to buy or possess e-cigarettes and against policy for students to vape at school – rules that tons of kids are breaking – Teen Advisory Board members knew they’d have trouble getting anyone to speak about it on the record.
“Sure, I vape constantly during third and fifth hours, hiding my JUUL (the most-popular vaping device) in the sleeve of my hoody. Those teachers are SO clueless.”
No, that kind of interview was so not going to happen.
So, our kids devised an anonymous survey for students, interviewed two adult professionals who confront the vaping epidemic among teens every day, and tapped into their own research and observations.
The special report you’ll find in today’s paper, leading off on Page 1 with an overview story by Leader assistant publisher Peggy Scott with help from the young journalists, is the culmination of all that work.
It was a daunting and ambitious project, and we’re understandably proud of our board.
They worry that one reason vaping is so popular among teenagers is that the health risks of vaping are unknown, at present.
Boy, do I get that.
My father started smoking at age 13 and died at age “80 and a half,” as he told his end-of-life caregivers, of lung cancer.
When he picked up his first cigarette in 1941, the tobacco industry was flooding the culture with advertisements featuring doctors who swore that they themselves were smokers and that concern about health risks was just fear-mongering.
There was so much cigarette smoke swirling around in movies made in that era, among both women and men, it’s hard to notice anything else going on.
It wasn’t until 1964 that a U.S. Surgeon General’s Report declared with no reservations that smoking was a confirmed killer. Cigarette use has dropped ever since, from about 42 percent of the adult population in those days to about 14 percent today.
But none of that was in time for my dad, his sister Ruth, and the millions more who had to go through the crucible of lung cancer to exit the Earth.
My dad spent some of his last few weeks of hospice in my living room, courageous to the end. But this is not the way any of us would choose to die.
As the scary updates on the dangers of smoking mounted, he changed his ways. First, he took his smoking outdoors to protect his family, and then he used filters to protect himself.
He quit smoking cold turkey at age 63, 17 years (17 and a half?) before he passed, but his death sentence had been signed and sealed as a teenager.
Today’s vaping industry is in about the same place smoking was when my dad took his first draw. Millions of teenagers are vaping without information about its long-term effects. It might be decades before a future surgeon general, now in diapers, weighs in.
We DO know that one JUUL pod contains the same amount of highly addictive nicotine as a pack of cigarettes, but can be used up much more quickly than the pack will be. We also know that the aerosol from e-cigarettes contains many potentially harmful chemicals and so do some of the “juice” flavorings.
A report produced by Florida International University cites statistics claiming that teen vaping increased by 900 percent from 2011 to 2015 (imagine what it is now), and that 30 percent of teens who vape advance to cigarettes within six months.
Vaping has become big business, and while the industry has been making lots of noise lately about how it’s not targeting teens, tell that to the Leader Teen Advisory Board.
They speak of seductive vaping ads on Instagram, Snapchat and other social media targeted to young people and of vape flavors that seem designed to be particularly appealing to the under-21 crowd.
With a credit to Meredith Willson, creator of “The Music Man”:
We got Trouble, folks, right here in River City (OK, that’s not literally our name here in JC, but we do have three rivers, Mississippi, Meramec and Big).
Trouble starts with T and that rhymes with V and that stands for…
The serious, concerning, menacing new vice in town – vaping.
Please read our special report.
