Heavy Metal High: How Vaping is Putting Teens Around America at Risk

Post date: May 3, 2023

By Isabella Norton

Youth all around the world have had a lengthy, toxic romance with nicotine products, with heavy emphasis on toxic. Teenagers who use tobacco have a heightened risk of coronary heart disease, strokes, and developing lung cancer. Through many anti-smoking campaigns and laws, traditional cigarette usage in high school students has gone down to a third of what it was in 2011. However, the dangerous drug has not just disappeared in the modern day. One in seven American high school students have a cloud of deadly smoke hanging over their heads, and are unable to comprehend the danger they’ve stumbled upon until it’s too late. As traditional cigarette use has declined, e-cigarette use has shot up. E-cigarettes, initially made to help smokers quit, are being used to lure more vulnerable teens into the dark jaws of nicotine addiction. Full of flavorants such as diacetyl, which is associated with serious lung disease, and heavy metals, such as nickel, tin, and lead, vaping is all set to take smoking’s place as the modern teen’s deadliest vice. These perilous products pose a serious risk to teenagers and should not be advertised or sold to them.

While e-cigarettes carry less risks than their original counterparts, they still are not safe for underage consumption. Nicotine, no matter how it enters the body, can still affect brain development. This is especially true in teenagers, whose frontal lobes (which control decision making and reasoning) are not finished growing until age 25. E-cigarettes can also be just as addictive as traditional cigarettes. Adolescents pick up new information much quicker than adults do, as their maturing minds are predisposed to building new synapses (mental connections) when learning a new skill, topic, or habit. Ninety percent of substance abusers started using before they were 18. Addiction is a form of learning. Making the connection between taking a hit of their latest drug (such as e-cigarettes) and a feeling of pleasure leaves drug-using youth as 6.5 times more likely to have a substance-use disorder later on in life. Vaping is currently condemning children to a life of drug use that will permanently damage their bodies. 

It cannot be emphasized enough that e-cigarettes were not invented with teens in mind. Their initial idea, an attempt to wean addicts off nicotine with less dangerous byproducts, was an honorable one. Withdrawal is an incredibly difficult process, which often causes severe sickness in those trying their best to quit. E-cigarettes offer a way to ease that pain. However, as said in Henry G. Bohn’s Hand-book of Proverbs, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It may appear that letting people, even teens, take a hit off a vape is the lesser of two evils. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The same corporations who were peddling poisonous products that filled clean air with tobacco smoke and their users’ lungs with tar are now stepping out of the shadows once more to sell their sickening substances. Altria, the parent company of Marlboro, and Reynolds American, which owns Newport, have their fingers in 80 percent of the e-cigarette pie. E-cigarettes are not rivals to big, bad tobacco: they dance in hand and hand. Now, it is clear that e-cigarettes are being used to sink their hooks into a new generation for the sake of profit. It’s time to cast off these cigarette chains, electronic or not, and stop allowing these corporations to give the youth of America poison just to line their pockets.