The general public thinks that vaping is safer than smoking cigarettes and while that may be true for cigarette smokers, it’s not that same for teens that have no previous experience. There have been around 33 deaths connected to vaping in 24 states, and doctor’s fear there’s more to come.

Mr. Santos, the Drug Abuse Counselor at Wakefield High School, was asked, “Why is Juuling bad for teens, especially if they have no history with smoking cigarettes?”; he said, “Juul’s have a chemical called ‘nicotine’ and don’t realize that they have a huge chance of getting addicted, and then once they aren’t able to get pods they will result in using cigarette, then they will be exposed to not only nicotine, but to other chemicals.” So, vaping, or juuling, is an introduction to more dangerous products.

Senior Aaron Queen was part of the round table discussion headed by Tim Kaine on the harm of vaping and how to prevent its use at the Career Center on October 18th. Aaron said, “I don’t know if you can actually die from vaping, but I know you can definitely get cancer.” Why doesn’t he vape? “Sports. Lungs.”

According to CNBC.com more than 1/4 of high school students in the U.S. have used vapes, reportedly 27.5% of high school teens remember using a vape in the past 30 days. This percentage went up from last year’s 20.8%. The CDC said, “as of October 15, 2019, [there have been] 1,479 lung injury cases associated with the use of e-cigarette, or vaping, products have been reported to CDC from 49 states (all except Alaska), the District of Columbia, and 1 U.S. territory.”

Mr. Santos said that there are a lot of the health problems that come with vaping; “The first one will be addiction, and then the second one will be respiratory illnesses also knows as ‘popcorn’ lungs.  There is also a solvent that when is heated gets turned into hydrogen cyanide, and cyanide is a deadly poison.”

Popcorn lungs is incurable, once you have it, then you have it for life. So if you or someone you know are having trouble with an addiction to juuling, they are steps you can take to get help. Mr. Santos said, “they need to realize that they are addicted to nicotine, and they will have to go through a program where they will receive help.”

The risks that come with juuling are potentially life threatening, so put down the juul, and seek help. It’s not cool to juul.