**This article includes quotes from anonymous sources, please respect their wishes to be anonymous and do not try to figure out who they are.**
“When you're a two-year-old and your dad’s smoking around you, like two packs a day in the family room, it's like...you're gonna get addicted.” -Zuko
Zuko sat in his car in between doing delivery orders, the cold air locked outside, the heat blasting. A pack of light blue American Spirits sat in his car and stared at him as he spoke about his struggles with addiction. He spoke about how he had originally started out just vaping with 0% nicotine juices, the non-addictive stuff, but it evolved into hanging out with ‘skater kids’ who smoked cigarettes all the time, and suddenly he was hooked.
“Even when I would ‘quit’, It was... it was hard to just like, stop smoking.” -Zuko
In an article in the New York Times by Alex Bogusky, the statistics for vaping in high school students given by the CDC are stated. The percentage of high school students who vape rose by 80 percent from 2017 to 2018, the same year Zuko was a high school student. The previously reduced progress of lowering tobacco use amongst teenagers had been eradicated. With vapes being more accessible and more discreet, there’s no incentive to stop.
“I wake up, the first thing I do before I even open my eyes is reach for my Juul. I take a hit. I open my eyes. Take a hit. All-day long the same thing.” - Dakota
It doesn’t stop with vaping, it usually leads to cigarettes. Zuko and I agreed that a vape is the ‘gateway drug’ of smoking. After that, it’s a for-life habit, it’s a stress relief tool, it’s an ease for oral fixation. A cigarette between your teeth and a Juul between your lips are synonymous.
“I have tried so many different things [to stop smoking] just straight up. It was always just kind of like I felt like I was fighting myself all day, so I just decided to have another smoke about it because it would give me headaches and there was too much going on to not have that relief.” -Zuko
The relief aspect seemed to be a consensus for all three people I interviewed.
“At this point, I'm at a very stressful time in my life. Before the past two weeks, I hadn’t smoked any sort of nicotine for, I want to say, like a year.” -Kelsey
It’s a vicious cycle. Similar to Zuko’s predicament, Kelsey explained the need for the relief of her e-cigarette in her mouth and nicotine flowing through her veins. She laid in her bed while speaking to me, her dog barking in the background made her jump, and we laughed as if we weren’t speaking about how smoking can give you cancer.
“It's fucking weird, how it’s just consumer products, and you literally burn your money to kill yourself quicker.” -Zuko
It’s also a social thing. The social aspect of smoking has created a community based upon the type of cigarettes you smoke or the brand of vape juice you inhale.
“It's like you can kind of tell who you're going to connect with, by, like, the kind of cigarettes they're smoking. Somebody is like, ‘Oh, I smoke Newports,’ and it's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? You're weird. Or if the kid’s smoking American Spirits. You're like, Oh, well, you smoke cigarettes I like! It's like a... it almost feels like a gang thing.” -Zuko
Zuko, Kelsey, and Dakota all spoke about how smoking became a social habit for them. Take a hit off of someone’s Juul, or smoke a cigarette with them? Friends in one moment, strangers in the next.
“It was just kind of like, oh, everyone does this or you're not like...you're not living your best life.” - Kelsey
How did we get here? The generation that was “supposed to kill off Big Tobacco” cannot just suddenly have a higher addiction rate than most past generations out of nowhere. The answer lies in marketing. It lies in the way advertising companies suddenly have crawled back to Big Tobacco after vehemently refusing to help them for so many years. “The sticks’ fruity and minty flavors, the “vaping trick” competitions that resemble bubble gum blowing contests of yore and the range of custom colors to choose from, like you would with an iPhone, attracts the exact clientele you’d expect: Students “hit the Juul” on the way to class and raise their hands for a bathroom break to get a fix” (Bogusky).
The rebranding of e-cigs from an aid to quit smoking, to a fun new way for teens to smoke is the main problem. Even with the new age restrictions on nicotine products, it’s not too hard to get a friend of age to buy it for you, just like you can have someone buy you alcohol. Except alcoholism (in the case of most college students) usually just leads to a really bad hangover, not a life-long addiction. Even the cost of the products hasn’t deterred Gen Z. $70 for a Juul starter pack is cash well spent in the eyes of someone trying to fit in with the trend.
The ‘silent killer’ isn’t done yet, in fact even with anti-smoking advertisements and strong evidence that vaping also leads to throat and lung cancer, the devices are more popular than ever with the national rise in anxiety from COVID-19. Stuck inside? Why not get a nicotine high to relieve some stress? While the addiction rates are climbing, there isn’t enough research being done to fully prove that vaping is dangerous and Gen Z, a generation that questions everything, won’t believe it unless they can see it. It’s a waiting game, and Gen Z is about to end up not making it to the finish line.
References
Bogusky, A. (2019, May 3). How Big Tobacco Got a New Generation Hooked. The New York Times.
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