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Vaping lights up controversy

Study: 1 in 5 high schoolers use e-cigarettes

Tribune Chronicle photos / Allie Vugrincic Employees of a Warren vape shop, Chalsey Freeman of Cortland, left, and Stevi Kline of Warren blow fog using their MODs, or modified e-cigarettes. Freeman and Kline started vaping to quit smoking traditional cigarettes.

Sandy Bartman of Cortland vapes as a replacement for cigarettes. She never realized the hold that traditional cigarettes had on her until her father passed away.

“I lost my dad to lung cancer and still couldn’t quit smoking,” she said. “It wasn’t until vaping that I was successful.”

Sandy and her husband Mark have owned Vapors Heaven on Parkman Road in Warren for almost three years. When they moved to the area from Southington, they said they wanted to bring vaping to the community.

Vapes are e-cigarettes that provide aerosolized nicotine and flavors to users through a vapor or “fog.” The devices, which range from the size and shape of a traditional cigarette to bulkier MODs, or modified vaporizers, have been on the market since 2007.

Kim Watros of Warren has been vaping for a year and a half. Before that, she smoked for 20 years, she said.

“At my building, TMHA (Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority) says we’re not allowed to smoke in the apartments,” said Watros. There is a pavilion outside for smokers, she said, but vaping is allowed indoors.

The key to the Bartmans’ success in quitting, they say, is that their MOD vapes have variable nicotine content, depending on the e-liquid used to fill them. The Bartmans said their most popular nicotine contents are 6, 3 and 0 milliliters — meaning some customers prefer to vape no nicotine at all.

Still, vaping has fallen under heavy criticism because the trend has caught on among teenagers and young adults who have never smoked.

JUUL

Juul, an e-cigarette brand that analysts estimate controls more than 75 percent of the U.S. e-cigarette market, has been singled out by Surgeon General Jerome Adams as the leading source of teen vaping.

The Juul uses salt nicotine in pods, as opposed to the e-liquid. The pods come in 5 percent nicotine content and the recently introduced 3 percent, which translates to roughly 40 milligrams and 23 milligrams, respectively. According to the company, vaping one pod is the equivalent nicotine content of one pack of cigarettes.

The easily concealed, USB-sized device has become popular among teens, despite federal law prohibiting sales to individuals under the age of 18.

According to the CDC 2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey released in November, an estimated 3.6 million U.S. teens use e-cigarettes, representing one in five high school students and one in 20 middle schoolers.

A Trumbull County high school junior said she believed the statistics underestimated the problem.

“Everybody does it — they just don’t admit it,” she said, adding it is her belief that as many as four out of five students at her high school had a Juul.

The identities of the teens interviewed for this story and the schools they attend are not being used.

“You get ‘hit high,'” she said. The buzz lasts about 30 seconds, she said, and it’s the main reason why teens vape Juuls. “Nobody does cigarettes anymore,” she said.

She spends $20 buying a pack of pods each week, making Juul a costly habit to maintain. Like many other teens, she has an older friend make the purchases for her.

A freshman student from a different school said his sixth-grade brother already has a Juul.

“During lunch I went to the bathroom and all the popular girls were in there vaping,” said another area high school junior.

She said she once witnessed girls pressuring an unwilling classmate to vape. “They kept saying, ‘Hit it! Hit it!’ She locked herself in the bathroom stall because she didn’t want to.”

When her cousin got caught vaping in school, she got a three-day suspension. Still, many kids get away with vaping at school.

Lakeview Assistant Principal Michael DeToro said vaping at the school is treated the same as smoking, with “automatic corrective action for violaters.”

DeToro said vaping is harder to catch because unlike cigarettes, vapes don’t give off a strong scent.

“It’s obviously in the mainstream at this point in time, all those things filter down to adolescents,” said DeToro.

“Our intent was never to have youth use JUUL products,” said Juul CEO Kevin Burns in a November statement. “But intent is not enough, the numbers are what matter, and the numbers tell us underage use of e-cigarette products is a problem. We must solve it.”

VAPE CULTURE

As of Nov. 13, the official Instagram and Facbook social media sites of Juul no longer are active. The remaining message on the accounts reads, “Our mission is to improve the lives of the world’s one billion adult smokers.”

The move off social media comes as part of the company’s multi-faceted attempt to dissuade underaged use of their product, as outlined on its website.

However, an internet culture already has developed around vapes, and specifically the Juul, that caters to a younger generation.

Juul’s Instagram fan accounts sport the hastags #doitforthejuul and #vapenation.

Online sellers on sites like Etsy and Amazon carry Juul skins, or personalizing stickers. One Juul skin on Amazon features the Mona Lisa with a mustache — an image akin to millenial meme culture. With a price tag of between $5 to $15, the skins are affordable for teens and young adults.

In response to the production of such items, a spokesperson from Juul labs said, “We do not make, market or endorse these accessories. The JUUL system is intended for current adult smokers only who want to switch from combustible cigarettes.”

After receiving criticism that teenagers might be attracted to the flavors of some pods, Juul modified the names, using creme instead of creme brulee and cucumber instead of cool cucumber. Now, Juul has restricted the sale of mango, fruit, cucumber, and creme pods to its website, which has an age verification process requiring buyers to be 21.

In an interview with the New York Times, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb identified flavors as the “core” of the teen vaping epidemic.

“They’re not for kids,” Mark Bartman said. “I like flavors as much as anybody else. If they took flavors away, it would damage the industry.”

According to the Bartmans, the key to successfully quitting smoking is finding the right vape flavor. “Everyone has a different palette,” Sandy Bartman said. For many people, the flavors are what keeps them from going back to cigarettes, she said.

The FDA, which only began regulating e-cigarettes in 2016, has not found them to be “safe and effective” in helping smokers quit, according to literature provided by the Trumbull County Combined Health District.

“Many public health officials agree that e-cigarettes are safer than smoking conventional cigarettes. However, research shows that smokers who switch to vaping do not tend to quit nicotine,” a report from the Center for Ecogentics and Environmental Health states.

The Bartmans say they still believe vaping is a safer alternative to smoking because vape liquids and pods don’t contain as many dangerous chemicals as cigarettes. Most have only four ingredients, two of which are nicotine and flavor.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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