E- Cigarettes Use is Rising Among Teenagers
Customers at Beyond Vape, an e-cigarette and e-liquid store in Manhattan. |
Kenny, a high school senior in
Weston, Fla., likes to blow e-cigarettes during study sessions with friends
after school. James, a senior in Fauquier County, Va., uses them outside at
lunch with friends who do smoke tricks. Tom, a sophomore from Westchester County,
uses them while hiking with friends.
E-cigarettes have arrived in the
life of the American teenager.
Use of the devices among middle-
and high school students tripled from 2013 to 2014, according to federal data
released on Thursday, bringing the share of high school students who use them
to 13 percent — more than smoke conventional
cigarettes.
About a quarter of all high
school students and 8 percent of middle school students — 4.6 million young people altogether
— used tobacco in
some form last year. The sharp rise of e-cigarettes, together with a substantial increase
in the use of hookah pipes, led to 400,000 additional young people using a
tobacco product in 2014, the first increase in years, though researchers
pointed out the percentage of the rise fell within the report’s margin of
error.
But the report also told another
story. From 2011 to 2014, the share of high school students who smoked conventional cigarettes
declined extensively, to 9 percent from 16 percent, and use of cigars and pipes
receded too. The shift suggested that some teenage smokers may be using
e-cigarettes to quit.
Girls Smoking E-cigarettes |
Smoking is still the
single-biggest cause of preventable death in the United States, killing more
than 480,000 Americans a year, and most scientists agree that e-cigarettes,
which deliver the nicotine but not the dangerous tar and other chemicals, are
likely to be far less harmful than traditional cigarettes.
The numbers came as a surprise
and seemed to put policy makers into uncharted territory. The Food and Drug
Administration took its first tentative step toward regulating e-cigarettes
last year, but the process is slow, and many experts worry that habits are
forming far faster than rules are being written. Because e-cigarettes are so new,
scientists are still gathering evidence on their long-term health effects,
leaving regulators scrambling to gather data.
In interviews, teenagers said
that e-cigarettes had become almost as common at school as laptops, a change
from several years ago, when few had seen them.
“It’s the healthy alternative
taking over my school,” said Tom, a 15-year-old sophomore at a school in
Westchester County, N.Y., who started vaping — the term for puffing on an
e-cigarette — to kick a smoking habit. He said about 70 percent of his friends
now vaped.
But opinions were mixed on why
the devices had caught on. A significant share said they were using the devices
to quit smoking cigarettes or marijuana, while others said they had never
smoked but liked being part of the trend and enjoyed the taste. Two favorite
flavors of teenagers interviewed were Sweet Tart and Unicorn Puke, which one
student described as “every flavor Skittle compressed into one.”
James, 17, the senior in
Virginia, said he and his friends started using e-cigarettes when he was 13,
after his father abandoned the devices in a failed effort to quit smoking.
“It was something for us to do that was edgy
and exciting,” said James, who asked that his last name not be used because he
did not want his smoking habits to be on public display. He liked the smoke
tricks that his friends had become good at, like blowing out the vapor so that
it spun like a tornado. His favorite flavor is called Hawk Sauce, which he
described as “a berry menthol kind of thing.”
He has never smoked cigarettes
and said he could not imagine ever starting. “There’s harshness to cigarettes,”
he said. “Girls think they’re gross.”
E-cigarette use had grown
exponentially in previous years, but from such a low base that the numbers had
been relatively small. But last year’s rise, which was captured in the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual youth tobacco survey of about
20,000 schoolchildren, lifted e-cigarette use above that of traditional
cigarettes, prompting an outcry from anti-tobacco advocates. They warned that
e-cigarettes were undoing years of progress among the country’s most vulnerable
citizens by making the act of puffing on a tobacco product normal again, and by
introducing nicotine, an addictive substance, to a broad population of
teenagers.
“This is a really bad thing,”
said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C.D.C., who noted that research
had found that nicotine harms the developing brain. “This is another generation
being hooked by the tobacco industry. It makes me angry.”
But the numbers had a bright
side. The decline in cigarette use among teenagers accelerated substantially
from 2013 to 2014, dropping by 25 percent, the fastest pace in years.
The pattern seemed to go against
the dire predictions of anti-tobacco advocates that e-cigarettes would become a
gateway to cigarettes among youths, and suggested they might actually be
helping, not hurting. The pattern resembled those in Sweden and Norway, where a
rise in the use of snus, a smokeless tobacco product, was followed by a sharp
decline in cigarette use.
“They’re not a gateway in, and
they might be accelerating the gateway out,” said David B. Abrams, executive
director of the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, an
anti-tobacco group.
Some teenagers described vaping
as an entirely different culture from cigarette smoking, and scoffed at the
idea that it could be a way into cigarettes. Kenny, the senior from Florida,
said students liked the mix-and-match accessories that a user could
“personalize and call your own.”
“E-cigarettes appeal less towards
the stereotypical longhaired stoners, and more towards sweatshirt-blue-jeans
Silicon Valley programmer,” said Kenny, who asked that his last name not be
published to keep his vaping habits private. “You can compare them to Apple
computers.”
Selling e-cigarettes to minors is
banned in many states, and the rule the F.D.A. proposed last year would ban it
nationally.
But the proliferation of vape
shops and equipment for sale online has made access easy, and some teenagers
said they simply clicked a button to indicate they were over 18 to be able to
order a starter kit. (E-cigarette equipment includes batteries that can be
shaped like cigarettes or a cellphone; liquid reservoirs, known as tanks;
cartridges; and battery chargers.)
Ethan deLehman, 17, a junior at a
private school in Pennsylvania, said he used to ask seniors who were 18 to buy
him e-cigarettes at convenience stores, but now he has equipment and buys his liquids
on the Internet.
E-cigarette refill cartridge
(Menthol)
|
“You can just go online and click
yes,” he said. He has used e-cigarettes to quit smoking, a habit he picked up
to relieve the pressure over getting into college. His favorite flavors are
Caramel Tobacco and Creamsicle.
A starter e-cigarette kit can
begin around $40 and go up to $200 or more, with the fluid costing from $7 to
$20 a bottle. That can be less expensive than smoking over the long run,
particularly in states like New York where the cost of a pack of cigarettes is
high, young people said. Alexander Wilson started smoking cigarettes when he
was 15. He said that e-cigarettes helped him cut down and save money. “It’s
cheaper over all for how much I smoke,” said Mr. Wilson, who lives in
Frederick, Md.
He recalled seeing one of the
e-cigarette devices for the first time. “I was like, ‘Dude, why do you have a
light saber?’ ” He said. “And he was like, ‘No, that’s my e-cigarette.’ ”
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