What should you do if your kids have been vaping? Learn all you can about it and then start the conversation with them.
If you ask kids in high school about vaping, you’ll probably hear them say that it goes on all around them. Some may also say that they have tried it. And you may even get a “What’s the big deal?” pushback.
What, in fact, is the big deal? Why has the Australian Federal Government regulated how, where and to whom they are sold?
Using e-cigarettes, also known as “vaping,” appears to be a safer alternative to smoking or chewing tobacco, at least for those who are struggling to quit using tobacco. For those who aren’t tobacco users — especially kids and teens — vaping is a bad idea. For some adolescents and young adults, vaping may actually be an onramp to a tobacco habit. And several tragic cases reported recently have raised new alarms. The problem: Some vaping products may provoke devastating and even deadly lung disease.
A dangerous addiction
Smoking tobacco products holds the dubious distinction of being extremely harmful to just about every part of the body. The facts are dismal. The latest Australian Health Department on the consequences of smoking noted:
Worldwide, more than 7 million deaths per year are attributed to cigarette use. This habit is also linked to cancer (of the lungs, mouth, throat, vocal cords and oesophagus), clogging of arteries, chronic lung disease and a wide assortment of other ailments.
If cigarettes are so harmful, why are they so hard for smokers to give up? Because along with the many products of combustion sucked into the body with every puff, cigarettes also deliver nicotine to the bloodstream with spectacular efficiency. This substance has the unique ability to be both relaxing and stimulating, at least for adults. It is also incredibly addictive, both physically and psychologically. Those habituated to its effects will crave it, sometimes desperately, within a few hours after their last dose.
Smokers who are trying to quit will typically try various methods of delivering nicotine in order to stave off withdrawal symptoms. You no doubt have seen nicotine patches, gum and lozenges for sale. These can be helpful to varying degrees. But they don’t deliver the “hit” of nicotine delivered from cigarette smoke. And these delivery systems don’t supply the ritual of inhaling and blowing smoke that most users find calming and enjoyable.
Enter the e-cigarette
A “smokeless, non-tobacco cigarette” was patented in the United States in 1965, but the version that has more recently taken the world by storm was developed and introduced in China in 2004 and arrived in Australia not long thereafter. A variety of devices and brands of e-cigarettes (the “e” for “electronic”) then entered the marketplace and have spread like (smokeless) wildfire.
E-cigarettes originally looked like cigarettes, but they have morphed into dozens of shapes and sizes. They all consist of a battery, a heating element and a liquid that is vaporised and inhaled. The liquid is water that normally contains flavouring, vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol (both of which disperse the other ingredients and create vapor when heated) — and variable amounts of nicotine. Variations in these components — along with different features, colours and styles — can dramatically impact the appeal and sales of e-cigarette devices.
Statistics about use
The latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS) has found increasing rates of vaping in Australia.
- In 2022–23, 1 in 5 (19.8%) people aged 14 and over reported using an e-cigarette at least once in their lifetime.
- People 14 and over who reported vaping in the past year increased from 2.5% in 2019 to 7% in 2022-2023.
Ask the administrators at your local high school and you will almost certainly hear that vaping — in class, in the rest rooms, inside and outside school grounds — has become a major disciplinary issue.
So what’s wrong with kids vaping? Let us count the ways:
Long-term impact
While inhaling flavoured water vapour is generally recognised as less harmful than inhaling smoke, no one really knows what may be the long-term impact — on airways, lungs and the overall body — of repeated exposure to the compounds emitted by e-cigarettes. Kids and adults with asthma are likely to have their symptoms aggravated by inhaling e-cigarette vapour, for example, but that may be the tip of an iceberg whose size and destructive potential will not be recognised until decades have passed.
Kids’ exposure
The repeated exposure of young brains to nicotine is widely understood to be harmful. Kids with various states of agitation, isolation, learning difficulties, headaches and mood swings, all linked to the nicotine they are inhaling through their vaping devices. The tagline: “Nicotine = Brain Poison” is not a hyperbole. Nicotine is not a benign substance, especially for a young brain.
Speaking of young brains, the adolescent/young adult brain is still growing and maturing until about age 25 – 28. Not only does this affect judgment and risk-taking, but it also means that teenagers and young adults are more prone to addiction than older adults. For a real-world check, ask any long-term smoker (especially one who has had difficulty quitting) when he or she got started. You will invariably hear that it was during their teen years — or earlier. Very few people start smoking when they are 35 years old and have a spouse, kids and career.
Talk about vaping
What should you do if you think your kid might be vaping? In a nutshell, find out. This has two components:
- Ongoing big-picture efforts at home, including building and maintaining a loving relationship through the teen and young adult years, open and transparent communication, creating a family culture that makes drug use (of all kinds) unattractive, transmission of values, and a whole lot of prayer.
- Opening specific dialogue about vaping in particular: Is it going on around you at school? Has anyone offered a vaping device to you? Have you tried it? Interrogation will be less effective than genuine interest, and some candid (and hopefully well-informed) discussion of the risks will go a lot further than a lecture.
If your kid is vaping
What should you do if your kid has been vaping? You’ll need to help her take this bull by the horns, which first requires understanding how big the bull really is. Again, without shaming and lecturing, try to find out what substance they’ve using, how much and how often, and for how long they’ve been using it. On one end of the spectrum, you may be dealing with experimentation and dabbling, which hopefully can be curtailed with some conversation about risks to be avoided. Perhaps by now she’s endured enough clouds of vapour in the bathroom, or seen some agitated behaviour from a habituated vape user, and is now ready to steer clear of this product in the future.
If your adolescent or young adult is already a steady consumer of vaporised nicotine, you (and they) may have a bigger challenge ahead. Remind them that this substance is highly addictive, and that the original idea of the e-cigarette was to wean smokers to a (theoretically) safer product – because they couldn’t successfully quit using nicotine gum, lozenges or patches. But once aboard the vaping train, how does one get off?
Withdrawal strategy
The skyrocketing use of these devices among adolescents, represents a whole new ballgame. There isn’t (yet) a well-established vaping withdrawal strategy, though a number of organisations are in the hunt. The Food and Drug Administration, for one, conducted hearings early in 2019 to obtain some expert opinion on possible treatments and strategies to help teens quit vaping.
For now it would appear that behavioural strategies are going to be at the first line of attack. The Australian Government has launched a webpage which has mounted an active campaign to end vaping. It includes reasons to quit with techniques and support to take action.
If anxiety, depression, headaches or other problems surface, visit your teen’s GP. Keep in mind that underlying anxiety and depression can contribute to a nicotine addiction rather than result from it, and these factors must not be ignored. Your teen’s doctor may or may not have an inside track on the latest approaches to nicotine withdrawal, but at the very least medical conditions such as iron deficiency or a thyroid malfunction — though rarely the primary problem, but simple to assess — can be ruled out.
Counselling, both for the addicted individual and his or her family, is definitely a good idea. Support from your pastor, as well as a trusted friend or relative who has had to navigate an addiction in the family, would be highly advisable. Last (but really first) and certainly not least, prayer should bathe the entire process.
Stay tuned
The story on vaping and nicotine addiction continues to unfold. For updates, continue to check websites such as The Australian Government Health Department.
© 2019, 2023 Paul C. Reisser. Used with permission. Originally published at FocusOnTheFamily.com