2-Fold Danger of Teens Using E-Cigarettes

Health Wellness

Image result for teens and ecigs

When I was a kid, smoking was very common among adults but not kids. If you look at many of the television programs and movies from before 1970, you will see just how popular smoking was. In the evenings during prime-time television, there seemed to be as many cigarette commercials as there were for any other product. Magazines were filled with cigarette ads and billboards along the roads helped to glamorized having a lit cigarette protruding from your lips. The rugged and handsome looking cowboy known at the Marlboro Man helped to attract men and women to the nicotine habit.

However, at the time, most junior and senior high schools forbid smoking on campus and anyone even caught with cigarettes was disciplined. Many high school kids did smoke and thought they were hiding it but little did they know just how much the smell of cigarettes stayed on their breath and on their clothes.

Then came all of the health warnings that smoking causes cancer. Anti-smoking groups sprang up all over America and pushed to ban most cigarette and tobacco advertising from television and magazines. Many states began to pass legislation to add an extra sales tax on all tobacco products. The push behind those taxes is that it helped raise money to fight cancer and the other health problems associated with smoking and chewing.

Yet, the sales of cigarettes and other tobacco products didn’t seem to be hurt that much if at all by the anti-tobacco push. Millions of American adults and teens still lit up and puffed away.

Then someone thought they were really smart and developed the e-cigarette. It’s a battery-operated devise that heats up a special liquid to point of creating a vapor, much like smoking. It didn’t take long for the concept to catch on and become a billion-dollar industry.

What attracted so many at first was that e-cigarettes didn’t contain the tar products found in burning real tobacco, so many believed it to be a safer alternative. Then it became stylish and millions of teens wanted to look like one of the gang, so they bought their e-cigarettes and began puffing away.

In fact, e-cigarettes became so popular with teens that the use of them by high school students rose by 900% from 2011 to 2015.

New research has found a two-fold danger, especially with teens smoking e-cigarettes.

First, that liquid that is heated up and inhaled as a vapor not only contains nicotine but some of the other toxic chemicals found in smoking real cigarettes. In other words, there is still a significant increased risk of developing cancer, emphysema and/or heart disease from smoking e-cigarettes.

Secondly, the use of e-cigarettes has been found to increase the chance of a teen and young adult turning to real cigarettes within 18 months of starting. They can still get addicted to the nicotine and that addiction often drives them to smoking the real thing. Instead of e-cigarettes helping people to stop smoking, studies have been found to indicate that they may actually increase the chance of smoking real tobacco products.

The bottom line is that e-cigarettes really aren’t that much better than smoking real cigarettes and in some cases are even worse because they give a false sense of safety.

E-Cigarettes Smoking Tabacco Teens

Related Posts