Local youth’s e-cig use is part of a national epidemic
It took us almost two centuries to accept that tobacco use can kill us. After the U.S. Surgeon General declared tobacco and nicotine to be cancer causing in 1964, we watched the use of tobacco, mainly by smoking cigarettes, decline by 50% in the half century. The numbers of youth under age 18 who started smoking also declined over that same time period. Still, tobacco use in all its forms remains our leading cause of preventable death. Some 480,000 people die every year in the United States from cigarette smoking.
If we ever thought we were conquering the health scourge of tobacco and nicotine, the current horrifying epidemic of underage use of
e-cigarettes will clear all our heads of any smoky illusions. Maybe we thought we had taught our children the lesson that tobacco, nicotine and second-hand smoke kill. But the fact that teen use of e-cigarettes, both locally and nationally, has doubled in the last five years shows all of us how wrong we are.
In Sonoma County almost one of every 10 seventh graders have used e-cigarettes. The number of regular e-cig users doubles by high school, where public health surveys show one of every five teens ingests tobacco and poisonous nicotine on a regular or semi-regular basis.
Our reporting for this special newspaper project has uncovered many misconceptions about e-cigs and vaping and a general lack of awareness about this mounting public health crisis in our local communities.
Just because e-cigs, like the slick high-tech Juul pens and others, don’t emit stinky smoke or leave behind ashes and butts, that doesn’t mean they aren’t just as deadly as a cowboy’s Marlboro or a Mad Man’s Lucky Strike. In many cases,
e-cigs are more poisonous because they are more efficient in injecting nicotine and other toxic gases into lungs. The biggest problem here is our youth don’t believe this.
The insidious tobacco industry has been marketing e-cigs and vaping as a safer alternative to cigarette smoking. They put enticing flavors with catchy names in their venomous products. Their billion dollar campaigns (especially Juul’s) claim e-cigs are a way for adults and others to reduce or quit their tobacco habit. U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams strongly disagreed last December when he declared teen vaping “a national epidemic.” He said, “I think we can all agree that e-cigs are not a good thing for our youth.”
Our news coverage shows many increasing efforts by local schools and public health care workers to raise community awareness and launch tobacco-cessation programs in our schools. But as Windsor High School principal Stack Desideri said, “Vaping marries the two things that teenagers love best: risky behavior and cute technology.”
We need to become educated along with our children about the chemistry, health effects and community costs of vaping. It’s not just our teens. Emergency medical calls for children 5 and under involving e-cig exposure or nicotine poisoning tripled last year.
Vaping isn’t cool; it kills. Exposure to nicotine during adolescence can harm brain development and hook young tobacco experimenters to a shortened life of addiction. The response from some parents about their child’s use of e-cigs that “at least it’s not some other drug” is reckless. Even if a youth is using low amounts of nicotine, eventual addiction is very likely.
In 2015, the city of Healdsburg started what has become a national movement for all local and state governments to raise the legal age of tobacco use to 21. Retired M.D. Dr. David Anderson, who championed that crusade, may have thought the anti-tobacco war was beginning to be won. He knows better and we invite you to join him and other health and education leaders at one of our panel discussions on either May 2 (Healdsburg High School) or May 22 (Sebastopol’s Analy High School.)
