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CPR News
Colorado Is A Hotbed Of Teen Vaping, But Lacks The Tools To Help Kids Quit
By John Daley
July 30, 2019
Wheat Ridge High School student Jim Lynch said he got "severely
addicted" to e-cigarettes, vaping one JUUL e-liquid pod per day — the
quivalent to a pack of cigarettes. Lynch was able to quit with the
support from his dad and a school nurse at, but he did so cold turkey
and described the nicotine withdrawal as “brutal” and “horrendous.”
Jim Lynch started smoking regular cigarettes in seventh grade. He
wanted to fit in. The trouble is he’s an active person and sang in the
choir. Smoking made his life hard so he switched to the electronic
kind.
“I heard all the myths about vaping being a healthier way to smoke and
a way to help people that wanted to quit smoking,” Lynch said.
By the time he was a student at Wheat Ridge High, Lynch was “severely
addicted.” Each day, he was going through a JUUL e-liquid pod, which is
equivalent to a pack of cigarettes. He got the shakes without a fix of
nicotine and “got really bad headaches,” he said. “It would make me
sick; like it would make me feel sick to my stomach.”
The turning point came when his choir teacher caught him vaping in class. The school told his biggest role model, his dad.
“Hearing how disappointed he was when he found out about it was tough,” he said.
Lynch quit cold turkey, the achiest, most irritable, three days of his
life. "And I would never really wish that on anybody," he said.
Teens are using e-cigarettes at increasing rates and there isn’t much
to help them stop. Colorado tops the nation for teen e-cigarette use.
An estimated 27,000 Colorado high schoolers report vaping more than 10
days a month. The state has few programs, shrinking resources and
little research available to help them stop.
The school nurse who helped Lynch quit, Rhonda Valdez, referred him to
a call line the state runs to help smokers quit and a tool kit from
Stanford University. She gave him toothpicks and breath mints to help
him with cravings. Valdez said Lynch didn’t start vaping again.
“He’s a self-motivator. He’s like my poster child, no doubt,” she said with pride — even though she admits he’s an outlier.
Most kids need more help to quit than Lynch needed and Valdez’ district
is trying to provide it by doubling the number of school nurses.
They’ll also be able to help students with drug intervention and mental
health. Even with the incoming help, with so many students vaping,
they’re scrambling to keep up.
“It’s worrisome and frustrating,” Valdez said.
Rhonda Valdez is a registered nurse at Wheat Ridge High School. She
helped her student Jim Lynch quit, but said Jeffco Public Schools and
other districts are scrambling to keep up with the wave of teens vaping
electronic cigarettes.
At the same time, the money available to help teens quit has shrunk.
The shortfall comes from the decline of conventional smoking. Taxes on
cigarettes help pay for state anti-tobacco efforts. With fewer
traditional cigarettes sold, there’s less money coming in. State
tobacco communication strategist Alison Reidmohr said there’s no
statewide tax on vaping products so more vaping isn’t creating any new
funding.
“More people are using more nicotine products,” she said. “Our young
people are facing an epidemic of vaping. We're not funded to deal with
vaping products. And so we've got more problems than we've seen before
and fewer resources with which to deal with them.”
One source of potential funding could be money the 1998 tobacco
settlement. But a recent report from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
found that despite states receiving more than $27 billion from the
tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, they “continue to severely
underfund tobacco prevention and cessation programs proven to save
lives and money.” They’re using the money for other things.
Colorado spends nearly $24 million a year on tobacco prevention, but
it’s less than half of what the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention recommends, and a fifth of what the industry spends on
marketing, according to a recent report.
Colorado saw a quadrupling of the number of minors calling the state’s
free cessation QuitLine in 2018, Reidmorh said. But there’s been a cut
to in-person cessation programs.
For medical professionals, like Dr. Christian Thurstone, director of
Behavioral Health Services at Denver Health, the teen vaping craze has
caught on so fast that they’re now in uncharted territory.
“Really, we have almost nothing in terms of treatment for these kids,” he said.
Thurstone runs programs to help prevent and treat substance abuse in
young people. He said research has shown the vast majority of teen
nicotine users say they plan to quit, but most don’t. About 8 percent
of young smokers with nicotine dependence need specialty treatment and
those programs aren’t available in schools, he said.
There are online resources, hotlines, therapy and coaching to help kids
manage nicotine cravings and stop smoking traditional cigarettes, but
Thurstone said he couldn’t find any studies about adolescents quitting
e-cigarettes.
“We need some research, fast, in this area,” he said.
He also said he doesn’t have any evidence to show if the same tactics that can work for smoking will work for teen vaping.
“No randomized controlled trials, all we have is anecdotes and we have
to assume that we’re going to treat it like we would treat cigarette
smoking in kids,” Thurstone said.
He notes the nicotine patches and prescription cessation meds are
mostly only federally approved for adults but there’s little research
on how they work for minors.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of
experts, recently released recommendations on youth cessation for youth
tobacco use, including e-cigarettes.
It found adequate evidence behavioral counseling interventions, such as
face-to-face or telephone interaction with a provider, print materials
and computer applications can have a moderate preventative effect in
school-aged children and adolescents.
“Most of the evidence on behavioral counseling interventions to prevent
tobacco use focused on prevention of cigarette smoking,” the panel
wrote in their report. “Given the similar contextual and cultural
issues currently surrounding the use of electronic nicotine delivery
systems in youth” it concluded the evidence on interventions to prevent
cigarette smoking could be applied to prevention of electronic
cigarette use as well.
National Jewish Health, based in Colorado, launched a new comprehensive
youth tobacco cessation program called “My Life, My Quit.” The program
provides free and confidential help from a quit coach, teen-focused
messages developed with the help of youth to encourage teens to quit
and five coaching sessions via live text messaging or by phone.
The Truth Initiative has also expanded its quit-smoking resources to
include a first-of-its kind e-cigarette quit program. It’s a free text
message program “tailored by age group” to give teens and young adults
appropriate recommendations about quitting. It’ll also provide
resources for parents looking to help children who are vaping and may
want to quit.
Meantime, Ned Sharpless, the Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs with
the U.S Food and Drug Administration, said the agency is accepting
research proposals to conduct clinical trials and further explore the
potential development of drug therapies to support youth cessation.
The industry has said e-cigarettes are supposed to help adults quit
conventional smoking. In a statement, a spokesman for the popular JUUL,
Ted Kwong, said “no young person or non-nicotine user should ever try
JUUL.” But he didn’t say how minors who’ve started might quit.
Gregory Conley of the American Vaping Association said most teens may
be able to quit on their own. “It’s only a small sliver that may
actually need some assistance to get off the products.”
Colorado’s health department disputes that and estimates 10 percent of
high schoolers vape nicotine more than 10 days a month. Conley said
cessation programs used for adult smokers may also work effectively for
teens vaping e-cigarettes and most teens who vape are just trying it
out.
“Non-habitual users who are experimenting with the product, which is
most of the teen usage, don’t really need any sort of quit program,
they just need to decide that they’re not going to use it anymore,”
Conley said.
John Daley/CPR NewsBroomfield County fitness supervisor Veronica
Mueller set up a booth outside the Paul Derda Recreation Center earlier
this summer. Teens received a free rec center pass if they handed in a
vape pen or e-cigarette. “It’s non-judgmental, no hassles. We truly
don't care where you got your device. We don't care how often you use
it,” Mueller said.
Some communities want to make the decision to quit easier. Broomfield,
a vaping hot spot, just started something new. The county gives minors
who hand in their devices a free pass to use the rec center as an
incentive to give up the habit. Veronica Mueller, Broomfield’s fitness
supervisor, said some kids turning them in seemed pretty young.
“Unfortunately, I would say 12 (-years-old),” she said.
“It’s non-judgmental, no hassles. We truly don't care where you got
your device. We don't care how often you use it,” said Mueller. “If
you're willing to spend your afternoon here playing basketball versus
going in the alley with your friends to vape, then we've done our job.”
One teen who stopped by a local rec center, named Delilah Baca, said
that gave her the push she needed. “I turned in my vapes. That
way I can get a three-month rec center pass because I like to swim and
I don’t want to ruin my brain with nicotine,” she said.
She’s 14 and said she vaped for four months to relieve stress. Then her
mom found out and got mad, so Delilah decided to quit. Her mom, Phemie
Whiteknight, hopes that’s the end of it. She started smoking cigarettes
at age 15 and admits to her addiction. Whiteknight said her “mom never
stopped me. I don't want her (Delilah) to go through the same
addictions with nicotine that I struggle with, because it's hard to
quit.”
Research shows teens who vape e-cigarettes are four times more likely
to start smoking regular cigarettes. It’s a habit, as Whiteknight said,
that is notoriously hard to break.
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