Spencer 1!

Nathan Spencer

Instructor: Malcolm Campbell

UWRT 1104

April 4, 2019

To Vape or Not to Vape

During high school, I started to see vaping become more and more popular. Till

eventually I started myself. I started vaping about one and a half years ago, I thought it was all

good and fine. I obviously wasn’t the only one in the school doing it. Most of my classmates

were using a brand called Juul. Even my mom had bought a Juul in an effort to stop smoking.

In my mind, I didn’t think there was any harm in it. In fact, it always had me feeling good and

relaxed. So if anything, I thought it was good for me. I didn’t know when I used my vape, why I

felt so good. So I used this amazing technology that we have called the World Wide Web, or as

most know it by www, and searched up “what makes you feel good when you vape”? That’s

where my interest begins in this topic.

Well to answer my question, the thing that gets you to relax is nicotine. That is all I

really knew about vaping until now. With me still vaping and my mom had not yet quit smoking

cigarettes, I wanted to take on this topic to see the effects of vaping to the human body and if it

really helps quit smoking. What I’ve learned so far throughout this project, I am going to share

with all of you. With this being said, what exactly is vaping and what is it’s process?

Vaping by definition is the action of inhaling a vapor into your lungs from a device and

then exhaling it. What happens is that a heating component receives energy from a battery and

heats up the e-juice into a vapor. From there you inhale and exhale the vapor. The e-juice
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contains propylene glycol as a base, nicotine, a flavoring, metals, and other chemicals. There

countless types of flavors that you can get, it can range from a fruit flavor like blue raspberry to

something outlandish like unicorn puke.

So before I get started on what all I’ve learned on this, I want to mention that it’s not all

of what is in vaping. There is still much more needed research on vaping due to it coming into

play about a decade ago. So they can’t prove the long term effects yet where it hasn’t been out

for too long. So how do you know if vaping is for you?

If you are currently smoking cigarettes, vaping would be the better option of the two

according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. Why is this you might ask? The main reason is because

there are more toxins in cigarettes than in vaping. There are about 7000 known toxins in

cigarettes. Research is still going in as to how many toxins are in vapes but sources can confirm

that there is considerably less amount than cigarettes. You might be thinking with all these

toxins, what are the effects of cigarettes?

These toxins can lead to cancer as it has to many before. It not only can lead to lung

cancer but it can lead to mouth, larynx (voice box), pharynx (throat), esophagus, kidney, cervix,

liver, and bladder cancer. I’m sure that you have heard of black lung related with cigarettes.

This is where tar from the cigarettes have coated the inside of the lungs making it harder to

breathe. I currently have an uncle that has black lung and when he breathes, it sounds like he is

Darth Vader. But with this is mind, yes there are toxins in vaping. So this doesn’t mean that

vaping is good for you, it’s still bad for you to be inhaling the vapor. What goes in must come

out too. This leads me to talk about second hand smoke. Second hand smoke is the inhaling of

smoke from another persons cigarette or vape. When a cigarette is lit the smoke still will come
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off the end of cigarette and can mistakenly be inhaled by another person or when exhaled from

the smoker and another person inhales it. This can be especially harmful to infants and children.

The CDC states that since the 1964 Surgeon General’s report, approximately 2.5 million

casualties of people that were nonsmokers were related to second hand smoke. Some of the

effects are sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), asthma, respiratory infections, ear infections,

and more. There is still second hand smoke from vapes and nothing is risk free, but it is proven

less harmful.

Now if you aren’t struggling with quitting smoking, you definitely don’t need to be

vaping. Here’s why. As I said before, there are still toxins in the vapor that is also in cigarettes.

There is nicotine and many other chemicals that are involved in the situation. Vaping can cause

you to start having nose bleeds through a chemical called propylene glycol. It is also been linked

to cancer, respiratory disease, and heart disease. This chemical dries out your skin and where

people exhale the vapor through their nose, it dries it out. So if you are vaping, remember to

exhale through your mouth. There are also aldehydes that are linked to cancer and diacetyl

which is linked to popcorn lung. According to multiple sources, vaping can actually lead you to

start smoking cigarettes. I personally haven’t seen this happen through any of my peers that vape

but it is obviously possible.

Nicotine, which is a key component in vaping, is highly addictive. So it will keep you

coming back for more. Medicinal News Today says that once you have become addicted to

nicotine it is harder to quit than heroin. This shows the severity of how addictive it is. I never

knew the harmful effects of vaping until I researched it this semester. Some of the side effects of

nicotine are depression, nausea, and infertility but there are many more. I found that if you
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aren’t fully matured, which is considered to be around the age of 25, it can affect the

development of your brain. Also if you are pregnant, it can hurt the development of the baby.

Why would you want to impair yourself or a baby that you are trying to have?

As I stated at the beginning, I started vaping in high school and a lot of my friends and

the people around me in school were too. It has become a major trend in the United States for

high schoolers and even middle schoolers. According to The Wall Street Journal, the number of

high schooler that have used vapes in the last 30 days have risen 75% in 2018. To put that into

numbers that about another 3 million users. The FDA has now considered this a nicotine

epidemic where so many of us have starting using vaping. Now just at my high school alone, the

most popular brand was Juul. So what exactly is Juul?

Juul is the most popular producer of vaping products. They controlled about 75% of the

stock in the vaping industry. The Juul is a product that is easy to hide and blends in with its

surroundings, especially in schools. The body style of the Juul is close to that of a USB drive.

They sell containers called pods that have the e-juice inside of it. There is about 0.7 mL of juice

and their main flavors of e-juice was mango, tobacco, mint, and crème brulee. Mango was the

most popular flavor at my school. These pods alone contain 5% nicotine which is as much as a

full pack of cigarettes. The FDA believes that they targeted the youth with their advertisements

to bring in more profit. So what did the FDA do because of this?

The FDA cracked down on multiple brands, including Juul, to prevent the youth of

getting their hands on them. What they did they gave these brands 60 days to construct a plan to

stray the youth from the path of the epidemic. If they did not meet the requirements, it could

force the FDA to take their products off the market. The main thing Juul did was take their most
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popular pod, which was mango, off the shelves and can only be sold online. But to purchase the

flavor, they require you to identify yourself using your social security number into your account

with them. In my opinion, it was a great tactic to get the youth from getting vapes out of their

hands. My reason being is because if their favorite flavor is off the market, which might make

them quit, and the only way for them to get it is once they are of age. It gives them more time to

mature and figure out as to whether or not they want to continue this habit. Once mango was

taken off the shelves, I personally haven’t seen any of my friends have it. Now I’m not saying

that this is world wide, but it seems to have worked to a degree.

With all of this information, it’s definitely made an impact on me. I’m quitting vaping

and trying to spread the word around to my friends. The only person I would recommend vaping

to is to smokers because it is clearly the lesser evil between the two. Smoking has caused a lot of

problems throughout history. Not only were the adults smoking when cigarettes first made their

appearance but children were too. This helped the tobacco industry have customers for years to

come through the nicotine addiction. We don’t need to have another generation go through the

same thing. We’ve always said that we learn from our mistakes and from others mistakes. So

let’s learn from our parent’s and grandparent’s mistakes. We need to use vaping strictly for

smokers trying to quit. As for vaping still comes with a major risk and there is still more that we

are yet to discover.