BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — Two-thirds of New York State healthcare professionals believe we are experiencing a youth vaping epidemic.
That is the headline of a new survey conducted by Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo for the New York State Quitline which surveyed 2,562 healthcare professionals.
"We reached out to a variety of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and respiratory therapists and the results were really the same across the board," said Tony Astran, Public Relations and Communications Manager for New York State Quitline.
"There is always going to be that element of wanting to be rebellious, wanting to do something to fit in, relax and distress, but there are other ways to do it," said Astran, adding that the New York Quitline offers a variety of resources for people of all ages looking to quit.
Resources available through New York State Quitline:
- nysmokefree.com
- 1-866-NY-QUITS
- Text DROPTHEVAPE to 88709
The hub for the New York Quitline is on the Roswell Park Comprehensive Center campus where just a few buildings over a visual representation of the vaping crisis was on full display inside a tobacco research lab at Roswell Park.
Dr. Maciej L. Goniewicz showed me a box full of dozens of vape products that had been collected from local school districts and were confiscated from students by teachers.
"We've heard from schools that this is a big problem there," said Dr. Goniewicz. "They see the products being used in classes that teachers had to confiscate the products so we saw this as our opportunity to help understand what is going on."
Dr. Goniewicz tells me Roswell Park works with 36 Western New York school districts and has collected over two thousand vapes over the last two years. Dr. Goniewicz says his lab is testing the vape products to analyze the level of nicotine and the impact of the chemicals used to add flavor.
Dr. Goniewicz says that modern vape products are made to be more appealing to young people based on price and the potency of nicotine. He says simply put vape products are not safe for school-aged children and teenagers.
"I would just clearly say those are not safe products. You are putting yourself at risk. You are inhaling a cocktail of chemicals that can damage your lungs. Over the next years you might experience serious health consequences of vaping," said Dr. Goniewicz.
New data on the issue of vaping was released late Wednesday in the 2022 New York Tobacco Surveywhich shows while the number of youth using vapes has gone down since it peaked in 2018 the frequency of use has increased.
Highlights include of the report include:
- Youth tobacco product use in recent years has been driven by youth use of e-cigarettes. In New York, e-cigarette use peaked at 27.4% among high school students in 2018, followed by a decline in rates in 2020 (22.5%) and 2022 (18.7%). These trends for New York youth use are similar to national e-cigarette use trends.
- E-cigarette use continues to be higher among high school students than middle school students (5.6% in 2022). The proportion of high schoolers who reported vaping on at least 20 days in the past month has increased from 1.9% in 2014 to 7.9% in 2022.
- Despite the differences in frequency of e-cigarette use, 54.8% of middle school students and 54.8% of high school students who currently vape reported that they want to quit vaping.
- More than one in five high school students reported vaping cannabis (21.1%), smoking cannabis (15.1%), and/or smoking a blunt (9.6%) at least once in the past 30 days.
