COSTLY HABIT

E-cigarettes are being investigated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after 380 cases of lung illness in 36 states and 7 deaths have been reported.

It is illegal for people under the age of 21 in California to purchase e-cigarettes or other tobacco products, but teens are still getting them. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a recent report from the CDC found that e-cigarette use rose from 1.5% to 21% among high school students and from 0.6% to 5.3% among middle school students from 2011 to 2018. A National Institutes of Health study found that about 6% of teens using e-cigarettes used them to digest THC from marijuana. In September of 2009, California legislators passed a bill to ban the sales of e-cigs in the state but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill. If you are wondering why the FDA has not moved faster to call out America’s youth getting addicted to nicotine and inhaling oils into their lungs, consider this: In 1828, two German chemists isolated nicotine from the tobacco plant and identified it as a poison. As awareness of the harmful effects of nicotine grew, 26 states banned its sale to minors by 1890. It was more than 100 years later, in 1994, that the FDA officially recognized nicotine as a drug that produced dependency. The FDA did not have the power to regulate the production and advertisement of tobacco products until the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gave it that power in 2009. To date, the FDA has not yet approved any electronic nicotine-delivery system as safe and effective for use as a tobacco cessation aid.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Confiscated vaping devices from high school students.