On November 15, Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, announced new sales restrictions on certain Electronic Cigarette flavors preferred by teens. The move was a response to a worrying rise in vaping among adolescents in the last year. “E-cigs have become an almost ubiquitous and dangerous trend among teens,” he warned, calling it an “epidemic” in a September speech. His claim is no exaggeration.
In 2018, 20.8 percent of high schoolers surveyed said they had used e-cigarettes at least once in the last 30 days, up from 11.7 percent in 2017. That is a 78 percent jump in e-cig use, based on data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (SN Online: 11/16/18). On December 17, the 2018 Monitoring the Future survey, a national substance use questionnaire of 8th, 10th and 12th graders, reported similar increases in the New England Journal of Medicine. That spike may be due to use of the top-selling e-cigarette brand, Juul.
One of a new class of e-cigarettes called pod-mods, a Juul vaporizes a prefilled pod of flavored liquid that contains a higher concentration of nicotine than other e-cigs. The palm-sized device resembles a USB flash drive and can be used discreetly, as it doesn’t produce much vapor. A survey of 437 California high school students found that teens are more likely to become regular users of Juuls than of other e-cigs (SN Online: 10/23/18).
Teens already have their own term for vaping: juuling. A person who inhales all of the nicotine in a 5 percent nicotine Juul pod (a 3 percent version is also available) takes in about the same amount as a smoker would get from 26 to 40 cigarettes, says toxicologist Gideon St. Helen of the University of California, San Francisco. A pod may last about a day for a heavy user, he says. Juul’s high dose of nicotine alarms public health officials. But use of any e-cigarette or vaping product containing the addictive chemical puts youth at risk. Adolescents and young adults are more likely to become addicted than older adults. Nicotine also harms brain development — ongoing until around age 25 — affecting mood and impulse control.