Regardless of these efforts, it was far too late to stop us fiending teens - we were already addicted. I had just turned 18 when my newfound freedom to be addicted to nicotine was revoked. Then in 2019, the FDA also raised the legal age to buy tobacco products from 18 to 21. In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned fruit and mint-flavored vape flavors, leaving us to gag on Virginia Tobacco and menthol. Studies showing the uptick in youth nicotine addiction prompted government action. For example, BMJ’s “Tobacco Control,” a peer-reviewed journal, revealed that e-cigarettes produce high levels of formaldehyde, the cancer-causing chemical also found in traditional cigarettes. Despite this friendly marketing, the proof of vaping’s goodness is not in the pudding (another vape flavor) studies have recently found vaping is just as bad, if not worse for you than cigarettes.
This non-threatening reputation, accompanied by the GenZ-friendly bright-colored packaging and flavors such as ‘banana split’ and ‘Kool-Aid,’ fueled the disease to spread like wildfire. The popularity among my contemporaries can be commonly chalked up to vape companies’ claims that they are not as bad for you as cigarettes are (despite delivering the same addictive substance). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vape use among kids in the United States increased by 1.5 million between 20 (my junior year of high school). The term coined for this behavior was ‘fiending’ off friends, the root word fiend’s archaic definition literally meaning ‘the devil.’ Sorry, Molly. I would just chief off any given one of my peers in literally any given social situation to get my nic fix. You didn’t have to worry about buying more pods just buy a whole new vape! They were (are) so popular that I never even had to have my own. This cycle spun until disposable vapes gained popularity in my junior year. Each one went with the intention of quitting, which lasted only a few days before I went and bought a new one. You could just buy more tiny plastic pods! I probably bought and threw away at least 15 JUULs in my time. JUULs were much easier to sneak into the school bathroom, and there was no need to refill them with juice. Throughout my time in high school, I kept up as box-mod vapes fell out of popularity, buying a JUUL from my boyfriend’s older brother as soon as I got addicted to his. In the beginning, it wasn’t even the nicotine I was after, as much as the social currency attached to knowing and sharing the information of which ‘shady Shell’ station wouldn’t ID you. It was a much healthier alternative! So, I figured, why not? This was only the start of five long years of nicotine addiction, countless money spent fueling it, and my estimate of at least a body’s weight equivalent of toxic waste dumped into me and the environment. While her story was convincing enough, a vape was not a cigarette. My parents tried their best, but without religion as a fear factor, there was no way I wasn’t going to hit a box-mod vape the first time someone offered it to my angsty 14-year-old self (getting grounded didn’t seem as threatening as a lifetime underground.) My mom had made me promise never to smoke a cigarette, citing her own horror story that one hit made her throw up on the spot.
Once I knew I was going to hell, or actually, honestly stopped believing in it altogether, I wasn’t too concerned about avoiding other sins that would punch my ticket down. She recommended I start sleeping over every Saturday so I could easily accompany her to church every Sunday… ‘or else.’ She was a really kind friend to be so worried about my damnation. Once I was dead, I would spend an eternity surrounded by even more fire.
While lucky enough that my parents relied on news outlets other than Fox, I didn’t have the luxury of a religious upbringing, so I was unable to wield conservative media’s blind faith shield against anxieties of the world ending in a big ball of fire - that’s what I thought global warming was as a child, that one day everything would get too hot and simply combust, flames engulfing me and everything I loved. “God would never really let something like that happen.” She was confident in her words. “My mom said that the government made up climate change for money,” my first-grade best friend Molly remarked to me, standing in front of her living room TV, staring unknowingly at Fox News.
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