A trend is forming among today”s youth with modern tobacco products like electronic cigarettes, and while these products are supposedly better than smoking the traditional cigarette, the long term effects of “vaping” are still widely unknown.
What is known, and what is most disturbing, is that the number of middle school and high school students who use electronic cigarettes, or “e-cigarettes,” tripled in one year between 2013 and 2014.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of high school students who consume nicotine increased from 4.5 to 13.4 percent, and the number of middle school consumers increased from 1.1 to 3.9 percent. About 2.5 million students now consume nicotine.
Mary Malone
The rise in numbers of these young children who “vape” led me to wonder – how are so many kids accessing these things?
The obvious answer is that they are having someone who is over 18 years old purchase this product for them. But, as it turns out, kids can easily buy electronic cigarettes online using a credit card.
A study by the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics used 11 teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17. The teens were given permission to use their parents” credit cards to try to buy e-cigarettes from 98 different online vendors.
Out of the 98, only five rejected the kids due to their age. Eighteen of them failed because of poor websites, having nothing to do with the age of the buyers. The remaining 75 online vendors allowed the underage consumers to purchase their product.
Most sites have little to no age regulation. Simply clicking on a box to verify if someone is 18 or older doesn”t cut it. The vendors either assume all kids are honest or they don”t care.
The latter of the two options seems more likely, because why would they care? As long as they get their money, who cares if they are hooking these kids on nicotine and other chemicals?
I care, and I think online sales should be discontinued. Kids have enough bad habits, like taking in too much sugar or McDonalds, and we don”t need to add to that by making it easy for them to inhale toxins that taste like cotton candy or any of the other flavors there are to choose from.
I”m not saying we should completely ban the sale of e-cigarettes, just the online sales. For adults who smoke traditional cigarettes and are having a hard time trying to quit, the e-cigarette is a much better choice.
E-cigarettes are believed to be better than other forms of tobacco because they extract the nicotine from the tobacco plant, but leave out the other harmful elements like tar that are thought to be the cause of lung cancer.
But they still use chemicals in the liquid and nicotine is still highly addictive. It seems like inhaling a chemical vapor can”t be good for anyone. As stated earlier, the long-term effects are unknown because e-cigarettes are a recent development, but we shouldn”t risk allowing children to access the product in case the future effects do turn out to be harmful.
Mary Malone can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @InkSlasherEdit