Shape Shifting

Shape Shifting

The tobacco industry faced a sea change in the last decade or so, as efforts to change attitudes toward smoking, especially among young people, had a powerful effect. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that in 2013, 17.7 percent of middle schoolers and 46 percent of high schoolers used tobacco. Just five years later, in 2018, those numbers were 7.2 percent and 27.1 percent, respectively.

That’s an astounding drop in a short period of time — and it had to be alarming to the tobacco industry, because, as the CDC notes, about 9 out of 10 cigarette smokers begin smoking by age 18. It is an addiction with seeds planted in fresh soil.

But among young people, the message was getting through: Smoking just isn’t cool, it certainly isn’t healthy, and it tastes awful. More and more, it became impossible to find a place to do it comfortably. The mystique that attracts young people to smoking was wearing off.

Enter e-cigarettes. They were introduced in the United States in the mid-2000s, but took nearly 10 years to become a phenomenon, promising a “healthier” option for providing nicotine. Soon, the vaping devices became sleeker — they often are compared to USB drives, which also made them easy to camouflage in the classroom. The nicotine dose was delivered in a mix of tasty flavored water vapor, which disappeared quickly and left little evidence in the air surrounding a “vaper.”

It wasn’t “smoking,” exactly, and it became “cool” again. The use of e-cigarettes use among middle school and high school students jumped from 2.1 million in 2017 to 3.6 million a year later. New seeds were being planted.

The alarming thing about vaping is the absence of real science about its long-term effects. It is likely to be years before we know the health risks of e-cigarettes and a growing population that’s intaking nicotine, a poison, at an alarming rate that approaches, or even exceeds, a smoker’s intake. Already, there are significant health risks associated with vaping THC products, since that industry is largely unregulated and seems to have used ingredients that have an adverse effect on health — to the point of killing people.

All of which demonstrates that the battle with “big tobacco” is shape shifting into a new form, but with the same old elements. The only message that truly will resonate: Tobacco is only one delivery system. No matter how you absorb it, nicotine is the enemy, and it is to be avoided at all costs.