TEENS SPEAK OUT AGAINST VAPING
Owen MacDonald sees it way too often for his own liking.
He watches teens like himself walking to school or clustered in a field exhaling clouds of steam and it bothers him.
Compared to smoking, vaping is less harmful, but MacDonald knows it’s not harmless and that’s the focus of a presentation he and a group of other high school students are bringing to young students when they visit elementary schools.
“The message I want to get out to kids is it’s not cool to put anything other than oxygen into your lungs, and it’s actually harmful,” said MacDonald, a Grade 12 student at Duchess Park Secondary School.
He leads the anti-vaping initiative as part of the School District 57 District Student Advisory Council.
“Vaping is better than smoking but both are pretty bad. It’s right in your face at school and everyone knows that a lot of people vape. The main thing I’m doing is helping elementary students make informed decisions on what they’re actually putting into their bodies and having them see the harms of it so they’ll know it’s not as harmless as people will have them think.”
In those school assemblies, MacDonald shows a news clip of 19-year-old Jaycen Stephens of Armstrong, who has filed a suit in BC Supreme Court against JUUL, the vaping cartridge manufacturer. JUUL makes small, easily-hidden devices for vaping that look like USB flash drives which contain concentrated doses of addictive nicotine and are often flavoured. Stephens started vaping when he was 16 and says it’s the cause of his respiratory problems.
He says he has a constant feeling of fluid in his lungs and is unable to run. The suit claims Stephens was unaware of the risks of vaping before he got hooked on it.
MacDonald has visited Heritage, College Heights and Pinewood elementary schools and the list of schools that want the advisory group to present to their students is growing, with visits to Heather Park and Buckhorn schools in the works.
“I find when you’re talking to elementary kids about in-depth subjects such as the harms of vaping, you really need to be interactive,” said MacDonald. “If you’re just talking at them they’re not going to like it, but if you’re talking to them and having an interactive two-way conversation they really seem to grasp on to the subject a lot more.”
Each secondary school and five elementary schools in the city have at least two Student Advisory Council representatives and MacDonald will bring one or two with him when he makes his presentations.