Addicted teen finds quitting e-cigs difficult
READING, Mass. — He was supposed to inhale on something that looked like a flash drive and threw off just a wisp of a cloud? What was the point?
A skeptical Matt Murphy saw his first Juul at a high school party in the summer of 2016, in a suburban basement crowded with kids shouting over hiphop and swigging from Poland Spring water bottles filled with bottom-shelf vodka, followed by Diet Coke chasers.
Everyone knew better than to smoke cigarettes.
But a few were amusing themselves by blowing voluptuous clouds with clunky vapes that had been around since middle school.
This Juul looked puny in comparison. Just try it, his friend urged. It’s awesome.
Matt, 17, drew a pleasing, minty moistness into his mouth. Then he held it, kicked it to the back of his throat and let it balloon his lungs.
Blinking in astonishment at the euphoric power-punch of the nicotine, he felt it — what he would later refer to as “the head rush.”
“It was love at first puff,” said Matt, now 19.
So began a toxic relationship with an e-cigarette that would, over the next two years, develop into a nicotine addiction that drained his savings and culminated in a shouting, tearful confrontation with his parents.
He would come to hate himself for being dependent on the tiny device, which he nicknamed his “11th finger.”
After a few weeks of bumming daily hits from friends (called “fiending”), Matt went on a family vacation out West. On his second day without a Juul, he found he wanted one desperately. On the third, he couldn’t take it anymore.
He searched Juul’s website to find a local store that sold it and ordered an Uber to get there, mumbling a nonchalant excuse to relatives.
Between the cost of the ride service plus the Juul “starter” kit, he spent $100 to sate his need.
But by the time he got to college, he began to admit to himself he had a problem. By now his vaping was about maintenance, keeping the craving irritability at bay.
This past summer, Matt returned home to work construction for his father, a building contractor. One day, Matt’s mother walked into his room to collect his dirty laundry. There was his backpack, unzipped, open. The confrontation with his parents was epic. The vaping had to end. Nicotine withdrawal, he said, was hell. He was overtaken with bouts of anxiety. Who was he without his 11th finger? He would get the shakes, curl up in his bed, overcome with a sense of powerlessness.
After three weeks, the worst of it passed. Even still, Matt can tick off to the day how long it’s been since he stopped on June 6 — 163 days as of Friday.