So, what’s the deal with vaping? We all know someone who does it, even if we haven’t done it ourselves. But why have e-cigarettes become such a hot topic over the years? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) produces so many anti-vaping public service announcements every year, but why has it been deemed a cause worth their time and effort?
Humans have been smoking in some form or another for thousands of years. Some of the earliest records of smoking tobacco date back to the early Americas around 5000 BC, even though it was initially restricted to religious figures and ceremonies. While it is true that for thousands of years it was unknown whether or not smoking tobacco was cancer-causing, that knowledge didn’t seem to stop many people from moving away from their smoking habits when the correlation with cancer began being published in the 1940s and 1950s. Although it’s been known for years now that smoking cigarettes is dangerous for your health, in a world full of dangerous things, that alone doesn’t seem to deter people. Today, about 12.6 percent of high school students use tobacco in any form, with 7.7 percent of these students using e-cigarettes. This is still a significant drop in nicotine usage when compared to the year 2000, when tobacco usage among high school students sat around 34.5 percent.
One of the major factors that attracts young people to vaping is the fact that they’re colorful and fruit-flavored. But a larger factor of temptation is the current quality of life for people, especially young people, in America. In 2023, the number of school shootings in America reached an all time high at 346 school shootings in a year, meaning nearly one school shooting occurred every day. Young people have also lived through COVID-19, which affected many students’ grades, stress levels and social skills. It’s a well-known fact that there is a correlation between unhealthy levels of stress and turning toward drugs or other unhealthy coping mechanisms to handle your worries. For this reason, telling a teenager that they should stop vaping because it’s not good for their health will most likely not prove to be effective. On top of the stress of coming out of a global pandemic and living in fear of their physical safety at school, the FDA — the very organization putting out public service announcements to curb vaping — is the same organization that lets money-hungry corporations control the guidelines for what is allowed to pass as “food” in this country, and lets the American people eat food that is extremely unhealthy for them.
There have been 68 confirmed deaths due to EVALI, a condition in the lungs caused by vaping, as of February 2020. At the same time, according to the National Institutes of Health, about 300,000 people die from obesity-related health conditions every year. And I’m not bringing up this contrast in fatalities to downplay the seriousness of anyone death due to vaping. There is evidence that proves that it is dangerous for our health, but we need to consider what else the people working so hard to stop young people from vaping are also in charge of. Due to their shadiness surrounding other bad products, if the FDA was in charge of making e-cigarettes, we might not see any public service announcements convincing young people not to vape, just like we don’t see any public service announcements telling young people not to eat junk food or how important it is to exercise. The FDA doesn’t have the public’s health as the top priority when considering many other bad products.
So many things in America are dangerous in one way or another. From e-cigarettes, to driving a car, to eating something from the grocery store, it’s just too difficult to be healthy in this country. The best possible way to curb e-cigarette usage among young people is to create a safer, healthier world for them to grow up in, so they wouldn’t feel the need to turn to drugs to cope.
Ellie Shuart is a junior majoring in English.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece which represents the views of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.