High school takes action to thwart vaping in washrooms
A Deep Cove high school recently forced to lock its washrooms to keep kids from vaping in them is just the latest sortie in an enduring battle to keep e-cigs and vapes out of the hands of underage users.
Last week, Seycove secondary school administrators announced they would keep all student bathrooms — with the exception of those near the gymnasium and the office — locked until further notice. As Deneka Michaud, a communications manager with the North Vancouver School District explained, some teens have complained they feel unsafe going to the washroom given the vape use, which was happening throughout the day.
“At Seycove what they ’ve noticed is that the most popular time to do it is during class. Students are either texting each other in class or they’re arranging it beforehand, and they’re going and vaping,” she said.
The most popular places are washrooms, but students have also vaped in locker-rooms and on nearby trails, Michaud said. There have even been cases where students have vaped in class.
“It isn’t like smoking where you can smell it and you can see it. These are now very small devices. They’re about the size of a cigarette lighter and they don’t smell like anything and students don’t smell like anything, so it is hard to detect them,” she said.
Michaud said that by limiting access to less popular washrooms they could monitor use and get a handle on who the culprits are.
Teens who vape at school tend not to be cigarette smokers who are using the products as cessation tools, Michaud said. Rather, they’re vaping because they think it’s cool.
While vapes are mostly used to inhale nicotine and produce smoke, they are different from cigarettes in many respects. They are techie and sleek in a youthful fashion, and they’re used to consume branded “e-juice” products like Dr. Fog ’s Watermelon Raspberry, Candy King ’s Sour Worms and Vapetasia’s Killer Kustard.
Online videos abound to instruct new users how to inhale without coughing, stay calm when buying their first products and blow vape tricks. Vapes also tend to give off a pleasant smell that doesn’t cling to hair, skin and clothes like cigarette smoke.
Vape use flared up at Seycove around the beginning of October, but teachers, policy-makers and members of the medical community have been concerned about use by kids and teens for several years. Vapes are legal in Canada, but not for people under the age of 19. It is also illegal to give or sell a vape to a minor.
Milan Khara, a medical doctor who works at the smoking cessation clinic at Vancouver General Hospital and spends some of his time delivering talks to high school kids, said there is no doubt vape use is widespread in school bathrooms.
He said there is increasing acceptance in the medical community, even in the absence of decadeslong studies, that vapour is probably safer than cigarette smoke. For that reason, existing smokers have been encouraged to take up vaporizers instead. But that has raised concerns.
“We’ve done a really good job of de-normalizing cigarette smoking … are we now sort of igniting a new interest through this product, and also, does this product kind of become a Trojan horse for the tobacco industry?”
Khara explained there are three possible outcomes for kids and teens who start vaping. Some will stop soon after graduating from high school. Others will remain long-term users of e-cigarettes because they are addicted to nicotine and when they stop using the products they don’t feel well. And still others will graduate to become full-fledged cigarette smokers.
“Once you start delivering an addictive chemical to your brain, what often happens is that you seek to get the most efficient delivery of that addictive chemical to your brain. And we know that there’s no more efficient delivery of nicotine to the brain than through a traditional cigarette. It gets there faster and it gets there in higher levels than any other delivery system would be able to achieve.”
Khara suggested getting information to teens on vaping may be a better idea than locking bathrooms. He suggested parents talk to their kids if they believed they have been vaping.
Postmedia contacted several other school districts in the Lower Mainland and none said their schools had also restricted bathroom use to curb vaping. A student at Vancouver Technical secondary school said that school sometimes locked some of its bathrooms to curb vaping, but the school district would not confirm that.