A typical 12-year-old is more likely to vape with a Juul in the bathroom than find a pencil to borrow for class, a high school senior said Tuesday as federal health officials declared teen e-cigarette use an epidemic.
“Vaping has become ingrained in my school’s culture,” said Sarah Ryan, a teen advocate against e-cigarette use. “These products are used by kids at every age in every social circle.”
The Massachusetts high school senior spoke Tuesday during a media conference for the surgeon general’s advisory on teen e-cigarette use at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C.
“At one point the school had to shut down one of the bathrooms because the vaping had become so common place,” Ms. Ryan said. “It didn’t help much, because kids were still trading [Juul] pods and even vaping during class.”
Surgeon General Vice Adm. Jerome Adams on Tuesday issued the first-ever advisory on teen e-cigarette use. The advisory calls for policymakers to apply restrictions similar to cigarettes, such as higher prices and no-smoking areas, on e-cigarettes and for educators, parents and physicians to talk to youth about the dangers of the devices.
“We need to protect our kids from all tobacco products, including all shapes and sizes of e-cigarettes,” Dr. Adams said in the advisory. “Everyone can play an important role in protecting our nation’s young people from the risks of e-cigarettes.”
The advisory follows federal data published Monday showing sharp increases in the percentage of teenagers who said they had used e-cigarettes in the past year, from 11 percent of 12th-graders in 2017 to more than 20 percent this year.
“We have never seen use of any substance — and by America’s young people — rise this rapidly,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex M. Azar II said at Tuesday’s event.
Teen vaping has risen sharply since Juul — a thumb drive-shaped electronic cigarette — entered and dominated the market in 2017.
This year Dr. Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has directed the agency to cite more than 1,300 brick-and-mortar stores for selling devices to underage kids, banned popular flavors that appeal to teens from being sold in stores and issued warnings over social media campaigns.
Mila Milagros Vascones-Gatski, a high school substance abuse counselor in Arlington, Virginia, said the sharp rise in teen vaping detailed in the federal data is not hard to believe. In the first four months of the academic year, school officials have disciplined at least 43 students for using e-cigarettes, compared with two incidences last year, she said.
“Those are the cases that we caught the kids,” Ms. Vascones-Gatski said at the media conference. “You can multiply that because they smoke in the bathrooms and in other group situations.”
Federal health officials are grappling with educating young people about the dangers of e-cigarettes, which they also hail as tools to help cigarette smokers break their habit. There are about 38 million smokers in the U.S., and tobacco-related diseases are the No. 1 cause of preventable death.
“Neither [Dr. Gottlieb] nor I are against exploring the harm reduction potential of these products,” Dr. Adams said. “But we will not stand for another year of exponential, unprecedented, historic rises in youth use of these products and we both are convinced that there is balance to be found in this situation.”
Ms. Ryan and Ms. Vascones-Gatski said the greatest challenge to reversing teen vaping is exposing the truth about the products, many of which contain nicotine and some liquid formulas are made with harmful chemicals.
“Some of the factors that contribute to this increase include the belief that the main ingredients in e-cigarettes are water and flavors,” Ms. Vascones-Gatski said. “Fewer students and parents are unaware of the nicotine content in e-cigarettes and the risk of becoming addicted to nicotine in a very short time.”
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