juul – C-VILLE Weekly

Vape escape: Raising the vaping age hasn’t deterred teens

Bathrooms. Locker rooms. Cars. Check any of these places on a typical school day, and you’re likely to find students taking part in the latest teen trend: vaping.

“It’s pretty common around my crowd,” says one Charlottesville High School senior, who estimates about 25 percent of his classmates vape. “Kids will duck out of class every once in a while [to go vape.]”

Teen vaping, declared an “epidemic” by the U.S. surgeon general last December, has been a growing source of concern for parents and public health officials for a couple years, leading Virginia to join several other states and more than 400 municipalities in raising the age to buy tobacco and vape products to 21. A mysterious new vaping-related illness has only increased the alarm. But has the new law had any effect?

At St. Anne’s-Belfield, the law has made it “a little more difficult” for students to vape, says one senior. “But it’s not like students are going to stop or have stopped because of that.”

“Everyone knows who the people are that you get all the vaping supplies from, who’s going to buy [them],” he says. “It’s just generally kind of accepted.”

Since the law went into effect in July, students have used fake IDs and their “connections with retail locations” to purchase vaping products, says the CHS senior.

According to a 2018 Monitoring the Future survey, more than 37 percent of high school seniors, 33 percent of sophomores, and 18 percent of eighth graders reported vaping within the past year—a dramatic increase from 2017. Experts say many teens vape because they’re not aware of its dangers.

Sally Goodquist, Virginia Department of Health’s Tobacco Control Coordinator for the Northwest Region, finds that many teens believe e-cigarettes just contain water vapor.

“Young people are only educated on cigarettes,” says Goodquist. “They see vaping … as a safe alternative to smoking.”

Even after learning about the dangers of nicotine, some St. Anne’s students simply switched over to using vapes containing THC, a chemical commonly found in marijuana, believing that it was healthier than nicotine, says the St. Anne’s senior.

And at CHS, says the senior at the school, most students think there is little chance vaping will harm them.

Virginia’s new law “typically carries a punishment by a civil penalty or fine,” for those who are caught vaping under age, according to a statement from the Charlottesville Police Department. But it hasn’t led to more teen vapers being charged.

“We have not requested enhanced enforcement, and I’m not aware that we have seen any increase in the number of charges [since July],” says Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania.

But the recent outbreak of vaping-related illness—and a ban on flavored e-cigarettes and nicotine pods that’s been proposed in response—could be a bigger deterrent for teens.

Since August 24, 535 cases of vaping-related lung illness have been identified across the country, and seven people have died.

In the Virginia Department of Health’s northwest region, which encompasses Charlottesville, there have been three confirmed cases and one probable case.

Many have blamed “kid-friendly” flavors of nicotine products for the growth of teen vaping, and in response to the latest health scare, the Trump administration announced September 11 that it would ban the sale of most flavored e-cigarettes and nicotine pods, excluding tobacco flavors.

“Nobody wants to use a tobacco Juul. Getting rid of those [flavors] will take away the appeal because now it’s just as gross as smoking a cigarette,” says the senior at St. Anne’s, who stopped vaping after he learned about the vaping-related illness.

It is also possible the ban could backfire.

“People don’t really care what [the vape] tastes like,” says the senior at CHS.

If there is a ban on most flavors, some teens may turn to the online black market, use tobacco-flavored vapes, or even switch to smoking regular cigarettes.

“I know people that have already switched to [cigarettes] because of the stories about vaping,” added the CHS senior.

It’s unclear when—or if—a nationwide ban on flavored e-cigarettes will be enforced. For now, the CDC has advised people to avoid using e-cigarettes and never buy them on the street. It has also warned against modifying e-cigarettes or adding any substances to them that aren’t intended by the manufacturer.

Students light up over JUULing

By Sam Padgett

living@c-ville.com

There’s a new verb hanging in the Charlottesville air: JUULing. If you have heard it, most likely from a high school- or college-aged kid, rest assured it isn’t some odd youth mining craze. A JUUL, pronounced “jewel,” is a small vaping device that can be found in nearly any local convenience store. The device itself is nearly indistinguishable from a USB thumb drive, with no visible buttons or dials, which appeals to teens who want to hide it from parents and teachers.

A quick Google search on JUUL pulls up hundreds of headlines that point out the JUUL’s higher than normal average nicotine content for an e-cigarette and the candy-like flavors it comes in. The base device, which costs around $50, relies on replaceable pods that come in a variety of flavors, such as mango, mint, Virginia tobacco, fruit medley and crême brulée. Each individual JUUL pod, a slim translucent box about the size of a mahjong tile, is roughly equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes. (The JUUL uses nicotine salts found in the tobacco leaf.)

Portable and refillable vapes such as the JUUL aren’t a new technology. Similar devices such as blu and Vuse have occupied shelf space behind gas station counters for several years. PAX Labs, the small California-based company that produces the JUUL, didn’t anticipate such success and has been struggling to keep stores stocked. Teagan Lefey, a cashier at the Cohn’s on The Corner, says the convenience store sells roughly 20 packs of pods a night and usually runs out of stock every three or four days (customers must be 18 or older to purchase nicotine products). “Once we started carrying them,” he says, “we could barely keep them in stock.”

Since JUULs are a significantly more discrete method of getting a nicotine buzz than cigarettes, they have exploded in schools across the country (vaping and JUULing top the “risky behaviors” list from two area high school newspaper editors on page 15). Teens interviewed for this article said although they JUUL, they didn’t want to talk on the record about the product. A local high school teacher told C-VILLE she has seen a fair amount of JUULs confiscated in the classroom and describes the JUUL phenomenon like a meme of sorts, a popular in-joke among students.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes clear on its website that “youth use of tobacco in any form is unsafe,” and while cigarette use among teens has dropped, e-cigarette use—vaping—is rising. According to data released by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products, the 2014 National Youth Tobacco Survey showed that e-cigarette use among teens tripled between 2013 and 2014, while teen tobacco use has significantly decreased, dropping from 15.8 percent of high school students in 2011 to 8 percent in 2016.