Vaping among American youth is down to its lowest level in a decade.
Less than 6% of middle and high schoolers use vapes, also known as e-cigarettes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And their smoking of regular cigarettes is at a historic low.
Government leaders credit education in part for this. But this spring, the lead federal agency on smoking prevention programs effectively shut down when the Trump administration dismissed all full-time employees at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health.
That led directly to the cancellation of state programs, including one in America’s so-called “teen vaping capital,” West Virginia.
For two decades, the money funded a student anti-smoking program called RAZE.
RAZE student activist Kimberly Mills attends Wyoming East High School in southern West Virginia, where one in four kids lives in poverty. She said more than 90% of kids in her school vape.
“ Every time we walk into the bathroom, there’s like six people in a stall, in one stall, and you can smell it,” Mills said. “ You can see footprints on the toilets to hide the vapes in the ceiling. They’ll hide them in the napkin dispensers under the toilet seats, the trash cans, just anywhere possible.”
Before federal money ran out, it paid for anti-vaping posters, pop sockets for phones that said ‘happy and vape free,’ and student trips to Tobacco Free Day at the state capitol, Charleston. The main message of the program was that vaping — contrary to many assumptions — is unsafe.
“ We just really want everybody to know how dangerous it is and the brain damage.
It could explode in your mouth and mess you up to where you have to be on like a feeding tube for the rest of your life,” Mills said. “Just awful things.”
Vapes do not contain tobacco, nor do they create cigarette smoke. The main component in vapes is nicotine.
Nicotine, according to the CDC, can harm youth brain development, specifically the parts of the brain controlling attention, learning and impulse control. Studies suggest young vapers can go on to use cigarettes and other drugs.
Mills said her classmates need to hear about this at school because they often see smoking and vaping at home. Of Mills’ 10 siblings, five of them vape.
“They’re around their parents and their parents will vape, so then they’re like, ‘Oh, they can do it, so I’ll be fine,’” Mills said.
West Virginia’s RAZE program ended July 1, after federal money ran out. The state stopped budgeting money for the program eight years ago.
These cuts, as a former head of the CDC’s Office on Smoking Tim McAfee puts it, are “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.”
As far as the industry, a group representing vaping manufacturers and shops rejects most assertions by government scientists on youth and e-cigarettes.
“ The youth vaping rate in this country and the youth tobacco rate in this country is at the lowest levels in history. Anybody who tells you that there is an epidemic on vaping is not serious,” said Tony Abboud, executive director of the Vapor Technology Association.
Abboud argues vapes are safer than old-school smokes.
“ Nicotine is benign substance. What is harmful is when people burn and combust tobacco and smoke that into their lungs,” Abboud said. “Cigarettes have 70 carcinogens and 7,000 chemicals that they are burning and inhaling into their lungs.”
Vapes also have chemicals; some heavy metals, some carcinogens, according to the CDC. The CDC also considers nicotine to be highly addictive and can harm youth brain development.
Many findings on vaping are preliminary, since we don’t have decades of data the way we do for cigarettes. Still, the risk is concerning enough for Kristy Cardwell, a teacher who was an adult advisor to the state anti-smoking RAZE program.
On the windy, narrow roads of Appalachian West Virginia, you can drive a long way before seeing a single shop or public building.
“ We don’t have a lot of entertainment,” Cardwell said. “The things that we do have are harder for kids to get to because we don’t have public transportation. The closest movie theater is 45 minutes away. The shopping mall is 40 minutes away.”
As a teacher, Cardwell said she sees the kids who take a lot of bathroom breaks and has an idea why: They’re addicted.
“ They feel really, really good while they’re using the vape,” she said. “But then, after it wears off, they feel worse because now their brain needs this. And how can they learn if all they’re thinking about is having to get up and take that hit on that vape?”
At a vape shop in a small Appalachian town, you can’t miss the neon lights and cartoon figures.
“I’m kind of livid because I look at the imagery on the outside of that building and it’s very obviously geared to kids,” Cardwell said. “We have a little cartoon-looking guide dancing around on the corner. You can see the products, lined up along the walls, and the eye is drawn immediately to these bright neon colors.”
The Vapor Technology Association denies that colorful signs and products hook teens.
The end of West Virginia’s youth anti-smoking program is not the only casualty of federal CDC cuts. The state’s programs for chewing tobacco and anti-smoking campaigns for Black American smokers have also shut down.
Physician and tobacco treatment specialist Donald Reed used to work for both.
“ My motivation has been the pain and suffering that I have witnessed my father go through at the hands of a product that he never could quit, and now the resources that we had to help those who wanted to quit are gone, and they’re gone overnight,” Reed said. “It’s almost like we’ve opened the door to welcome death and disease back into West Virginia.”
This spring, after federal funding went dry, West Virginia lawmakers in the House of Delegates voted for funding to keep past initiatives going. And then the bill died in the Senate, leaving West Virginia students to face the marketing of deep-pocketed smoking and vaping companie, and dwindling public dollars suggesting they say no.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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