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The majority of young people who try e-cigarettes do so because they seem “fun” and “cool,” according to a new study of students from one Ontario region.
A survey study published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal went straight to the source to find out more about which kids are vaping and why. Over 2,000 high school freshman from Ontario’s Niagara region were surveyed on their smoking and vaping habits. While only 10 percent of respondents said they had tried an e-cigarette—and the majority of those kids, 56 percent, had only tried it once—most of those teens said they tried vaping because it was “cool, fun, or something new.”
It also showed that the teens who had tried e-cigarettes were also more likely to have risk factors associated with smoking, like having family members or friends who smoke. So it raises the question: are e-cigarettes a less harmful path for kids that were probably going to smoke anyway or a gateway for kids who might have avoided tobacco if not for a new trendy gadget?
“I don’t know if you can necessarily tease that apart,” Dr. Michael Khoury, a pediatrician and lead author of the study, told me over the phone. “We just have to be careful. When we see what happens to adolescent cigarette smoking rates in the coming years, that will be a suggestion as to whether or not e-cigarettes have played a role.”
Proponents of vaping tend to get testy about studies that suggest teens are vaping more, or that vaping is a gateway to smoking. They’re worried that overemphasizing the problem will lead to regulation that will strip away this harm reduction tool from the adults who need it. A study published last week in Nicotine and Tobacco Research projected that e-cigarettes could lead to a 21 percent reduction in smoking-attributable deaths, and another recent survey found an estimated 6.1 million European smokers had quit by switching to vaping.
Khoury said that while there’s growing evidence that vaping can be a successful harm reduction tool among adults looking to quit smoking, this survey shows that—at least in this one population of youth—that’s not what’s motivating teens to vape. And if teens are vaping for other reasons, particularly if they then go on to smoke as some studies have shown, that should be cause for concern.
“I’m not saying it’s a fact, but it’s a cause for concern and we need to be looking at it within the scope of something that could be useful to adults,” Khoury said. “It’s not like we’re talking about heroin or alcohol or any other drug. We’re talking about something that could be potentially useful under the right circumstances as a harm reduction device.”
In other words: just because vaping can be a harm reduction tool doesn’t mean it’s harmless in all scenarios. The best way for vaping to be more widely accepted for the good it does is to reduce the harm it may have, and that means keeping it out of the hands of kids trying to look cool.
Agencies/Canadajournal
THIS JUST IN: ”TEENS ARE EXPERIMENTING!” Nahhh…What’s interesting about this finding is that despite what the do-gooder$ think,traditional tobacco cigarettes are just as easy for teens to get their hands on, yet they are choosing e-cigarettes instead.It’s too bad that these devices are getting in the way of kids taking up the deadly & more profitable habit of $MOKING.The Government knows that teenage smokers grow into adult smoking cash cows & ultimately non Canada Pension collecting 50 to 60 year old corpses.Wake up! Health Canada is nothing more than an arm of the Government that’s out to protect tobacco taxes while pretending to protect the health of Canadian citizens.