Mil Schooley, an 18-year-old student in Denver says most of her friends have a JUUL — an e-cigarette that can vanish into a closed fist. When asked roughly how many, she stumbles a bit. “I wanna say like 50 or 60 percent? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the people I know. All my friends in college have one,” she says. “It just blew up over the summer.”
Schooley doesn’t have one herself — at least at the moment. Hers broke due to an unfortunate mishap involving her JUUL and soda water. But the trend to own a vape pen is real, with students bragging on Twitter about using them in class, and researchers saying they’re seeing a big spike in use among teens and young adults.
“We’re seeing it across college campuses and high schools. I have a friend who teaches high school, and they contacted me last week because they are having a major problem with e-cigs,” says Meghan Morean, a substance addiction researcher at Oberlin College.
Devices like these might be introducing a new generation of teenagers to nicotine addiction and leading some vapers to take up smoking tobacco cigarettes, a study out in Pediatrics on Monday suggests. That would buck a national trend of teens drifting away from certain risky behaviors like drugs, alcohol and unprotected sex. To read more from Angus Chen, click here.