I don’t know about you, but until recently, I honestly didn’t know much about e-cigarettes. Sure, I knew in vague terms that they somehow delivered nicotine, but without smoke and tobacco. Still, I didn’t understand how they worked or why we should pay much attention to them. This week, a story about rising e-cigarette use among teens firmly answered both of those questions for me.
Let’s start with the first one: how e-cigarettes actually work. Simply put, e-cigarettes rely on a battery that heats a solution that contains nicotine, turning it into a vapor that users inhale. Thus, even though the cylindrical devices look quite a lot like traditional cigarettes, the “smoke” coming out of them is mostly water vapor. In this way, e-cigs eliminate “byproducts” (like tar) infused into the real thing, while still packing a potent nicotine kick.
Proponents of e-cigs point out that they were created as a nicotine delivery system designed to help adults quit smoking actual cigarettes. They perform the same function as a nicotine patch would, except that they maintain a stylish facsimile of the real “smoking” experience.
So far, so good? Actually, not quite.
One perhaps unintended consequence of the growing e-cigarette market is that teens who never smoked in the first place are picking up this habit. And it’s a habit, some believe, that can propel young e-cig aficionados in exactly the opposite direction: toward smoking real cigarettes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released the results of its latest National Youth Tobacco Survey. Among other things, the report said that use of e-cigarettes among high schoolers has more than doubled in the last year, up from 4.7% in 2011 to 10% in 2012. Moreover, many teens who’ve tried e-cigarettes have also experimented with the real thing. Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, says of that correlation, “This indicates that e-cigarettes could be a gateway to nicotine addiction and use of other tobacco products. CDC director Tom Frieden concurs with that assessment. “The increased use of e-cigarettes by teens is deeply troubling,” Frieden says. “Many teens who start with e-cigarettes may be condemned to struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine and conventional cigarettes.”
Myers also notes that some advertisements for e-cigs involve celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy, Courtney Love and Stephen Dorff who glamorize their use. “These ads portray e-cigarette use as an act of rebellion,” he says, “much like cigarette ads have done.”
All of that is compounded by the fact that e-cigarettes aren’t regulated by the Food and Drug Administration at this point, as cigarettes are. But with increasing sales—and increasing concerns about the product’s potentially negative influence on young users—that may be changing soon as pressure to regulate and set age limits on e-cigarettes grows.
Still, the e-cigarette story, at least as it involves teens who’ve never used nicotine, illustrates once again the law of unintended consequences: a product ostensibly intended to help adult smokers quit puffing on tobacco-based cigarettes may unwittingly be introducing a new generation of young users to them in the process.
Recent Comments