Teen vaping crisis is on us as adults
We introduced and marketed it, and we need to resolve it
This past week some teens in our school got suspended for vaping in the washroom during classes.
Good discipline, right? Or was it actually a bit disgusting, as once again the adult world foisted blame onto kids for something they didn’t create?
This is not to say that breaking school rules should not be dealt with. But instead of the easy — and often useless — route of simply exercising power, we owe it to our kids to behave not only fairly, but honestly.
These past few months have seen a drastically heightened alarm over the serious health effects for kids from vaping. Medical authorities are wringing their hands about how to staunch this increasingly disturbing pattern that has led to huge increases in nicotine use and addiction, an unknown level of marijuana vaping, lung injury and even death. And when kids do it at school or between classes, they face school consequences.
Yet, until a few years ago, vaping did not exist.
The adult world introduced it, marketed it excessively and promoted its benefits and harmlessness. The adult world offered vaping products in a wide variety of appealing flavours, from cotton candy to coffee — and even if not deliberately targeting kids, the marketers had to have known it would catch on like wild fire. It is solely the adult world, and its reckless and culpable desire for profit, that is responsible for this epidemic.
It is akin to the business world introducing ice cream in a range of delightful flavours to a world that has never experienced ice cream. The kids all become totally enamoured and then the alarm goes out that it’s actually very harmful. Think how hard it would be to shift that acquired relationship.
Teens are physiologically and psychologically in a vulnerable stage of development. Their bodies and minds are first-time experiencers of a range of encounters and circumstances.
Of course, vaping with its flavours and great puffs of visible vapour is attractive. It gives identity, belonging, company. To have an expensive device and be able to share talk and behaviour adds to the sense of independence they naturally are moving toward.
The notion that the product is supposed to be off-limits for kids simply adds to the appeal. Cigarettes and marijuana have been off-limits forever, and not one kid has ever been stopped from getting them. They use as easily as any adult. We all know this, but pretend that regulation is a deterrent, a protection. We lie.
And advertising or informing, the way we currently do it, that vaping can cause harm will have a moderate effect at best. One reason is teenagers’ natural trajectory to independence and individuality. As well, kids don’t especially trust adults when they issue warnings.
Equally important is the natural tendency toward bravado and rebellion. The old Trooper anthem, “We’re here for a good time, not a long time,” finds a ready nod in the psyche of a large proportion of teens. Vaping feels good, dopamine surges, and who wants to stop that?
There is also the less talked about undercurrent in many teens’ lives of self-rejection. Many teens have known too much pain, trauma, chaos, abandonment in their young lives. This leads to a willingness to accept that they either deserve harm or care less if it comes. Thus, they feel if they are harmed by vaping, then so be it. And the more there is habituation or addiction involved, so, too, will denial play a role. Teens will close their eyes and hope disaster doesn’t find them.
So what to do? If we are genuinely serious about the risk to our kids of this phenomenon for which we are to blame, then we need to approach it the way we responded to SARS years back, when medical personnel were waiting in the boarding bridge outside planes so they could screen passengers before they reached the terminal. Was this overreaction? Maybe, but right now, why isn’t it appropriate that we overreact to right this wrong that we’ve done to our kids? There is no morality issue here — it’s all about documented harm.
Why not have squads going into all high schools and literally stopping classes to comprehensively present the facts, the personal stories of evidence, and our deepest apologies for causing this threat. Make it a theme in every school to openly address the issue and form teams of users to plot a direction out of the practice, complete with concrete incentives. Don’t their lungs deserve this?
Our teens are so new to the world, so vulnerable, as it is, to all the naturally occurring risks. This one is on us, and we need to resolve it.