Months after John Steffen died in Nebraska, officials said his death was part of a mysterious outbreak of vaping-related deaths and illnesses. In the spring, Kathleen Fimple buried her husband, John, and by the fall, she had reluctantly settled into her new life as a widow. She accepted what the doctors told her: that he...
For many years, my lead-in question with adolescents, after I asked the parent to leave the room at pediatric appointments, was whether the kid had ever tried smoking cigarettes. It made a reasonable lead-in because it felt less highly charged than asking about marijuana or other substances, and in recent decades, the answer...
It's a terrifying event for a parent, your athletic, happy child at a football game one night and in a hospital bed the next. "I almost threw up. I just couldn't believe it.," said Erin Bell Griffin. It wasn't just that her 17-year-old was in the hospital, it was why he was in the hospital...
Taylor Webb just drove the two hours home from college without his trusty companion of the last couple years, a sidekick so tiny he could hide it in the palm of his hand. He broke up with his vaping device in August because it had taken over his life. He was coming home to Johnson...
The cause of the outbreak is still unknown, and the only advice health officials can offer so far is to avoid vaping. The outbreak of lung illnesses linked to vaping grew by more than 200 cases in a week, now totaling 1,299, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday. Twenty-nine people have...
Tobacco-cessation help lines — traditionally aimed at cigarette smokers — are receiving a surge in calls from people who vape and want to quit Hotlines to quit smoking, or “quitlines,” were designed to help people kick cigarette habits, but calls and texts from people who use e-cigarettes are climbing as more people fall ill...
New York City has filed a federal lawsuit against 22 online e-cigarette sellers, accusing them of selling their products to residents under the age of 21, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, says New Yorkers under the age of 21 were able to readily get onto the websites...
Piper Johnson was all packed and ready to drive across country with her mom to start college when the 18-year-old noticed a pain in her chest. She took an Advil and hoped the pain would go away. It didn't. During the drive from her hometown of New Lenox, Ill., near Chicago, to the University...
Walgreens and Kroger said Monday that they would stop selling e-cigarettes. The move makes them the latest national retailers to get out of the vaping business amid health concerns and growing regulatory scrutiny. Walgreens, the nation's largest drugstore chain by total locations, will stop selling e-cigarettes permanently, spokesman Phil Caruso said in an email. "This decision...
The lawsuits accuse Juul of endangering students and forcing educators to divert time and money to fight an epidemic of nicotine addiction among teenagers. With school districts across the United States scrambling to reverse the rise of vaping among teenagers, three of them on Monday filed suit against Juul, the e-cigarette manufacturer, accusing it...
The 16-year-old looked sick. Tubes snaked around her face to deliver oxygen through her nose. Medication coursed into her veins through an IV. The culprit, her doctors said, was something in the e-cigarettes she used to inhale both nicotine and THC. Such reactions are rare though potentially serious: Of the 805 Americans reported...
No doubt you’ve heard by now how dangerous vaping is. The mysterious vaping lung disease causing lung injuries to young adults who vape in 46 states? That should be enough to convince you it’s time to quit vaping. But if you need a little more motivation, we’ve got it for you. Did you...
Unicorn Vomit. Cotton Candy. Gummy Bear. Skittles. Some teenagers who tried these playful vaping flavors thought they were just inhaling water vapor — not also nicotine, a chemical considered as addictive as heroin and cocaine. Now, as a mysterious vaping-related lung disease has doctors and parents urging the nation’s 3.6 million young users to quit,...
When e-cigarettes hit the U.S. market in 2007, they were promoted as a safer, healthier alternative to traditional, combustible cigarettes. The unintended consequence of vaping devices and e-cigarettes, however, is a new generation of vapers—teenagers—becoming addicted to nicotine. "In just one year, from 2017 to 2018, the number of high school students using e-cigarettes...
Several states have enacted a ban on sales of vaping products amid more than 800 reports of lung injuries nationwide Up until a month ago, it sometimes seemed like everybody vaped, from international celebrities to local teens. Now, it can feel as if everybody is trying to quit. Amid reports of at least 805 cases...
It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday and students from Cherry Hill East and Triton High School gather for a football game. A clique of about 10 sophomores mingle in the stands making typical high school banter: who was seen holding hands at the mall Friday, whose mom can pick them up, and where...
In Alabama, a school removed the doors from bathroom stalls to stop students from sneaking inside to vape. In Colorado, a school decided to forfeit a volleyball game after finding “widespread vaping” and other infractions by the team. And in Pennsylvania, at a school where administrators have tried installing sensors to detect vaping...
A Newburyport mother says her son’s vaping addiction got so bad, he was diagnosed with a restrictive lung condition. Kristin Beauparlant’s son was the captain of the Newburyport hockey team, until he was benched in his senior year once he was caught smoking his Juul, a popular electronic cigarette, in school. “He’d be skating...
An outbreak of a deadly vaping-related lung disease has sickened 530 people — mostly young men — and killed seven, federal health officials said Thursday, adding that investigators still haven’t found a cause. The number of people who have fallen sick so far has dramatically risen from 380 patients identified last week, officials from...
Preliminary figures from a national survey show that the prevalence of e-cigarette use among minors has doubled from 2017 through this year, despite national campaigns warning of the dangers. The rate of vaping among teenagers continued to rise sharply this year, federal health officials said, suggesting that campaigns to curb e-cigarette use among minors...
Sen. Dick Durbin is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to swiftly and strictly regulate the vaping industry, comparing it to Big Tobacco preying on youth. “It looks so innocent, doesn’t it?” Durbin said, holding up a USB-flash-drive-sized e-cigarette. “It is a deadly device.” Durbin, D-Ill., addressed reporters Monday following his letter late last...
Along with school safety, parents now have to worry about another real danger — teen vaping, nicotine addiction and the resulting health problems. Florida teens are among those across the country who have become addicted to nicotine through electronic cigarettes and are experiencing serious health issues as a result. On Friday, U.S. health officials put...
At just 14 years old, Phillip Fuhrman started vaping. Toward the end of eighth grade, Phillip went over to the house of a friend, who had the popular e-cigarette, Juul. “I just tried it,” Phillip, now 16, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I tried it because they were doing it. I started with the mint flavor...
A Texas high school is warning parents about their kids' incognito vaping habits. Petrolia CISD posted a video to their Facebook page showing they've already confiscated three vaping devices in a matter of eight school days. One of them was a watch with a vaping device hidden inside. A man off camera notes the school seized...
The Middlesex County teen says he was 16 when friends introduced him to vaping at his high school. He quickly went to a local convenience store to purchase his own JUUL-brand e-cigarette and sample different flavored-nicotine cartridges, especially his favorite fruit medley and mango pods. A year later, the teen said he was vaping two...
An 18-year-old student from Florida — who now says he is never smoking again — is warning of the dangers of vaping after his left lung collapsed on Monday. Chance Ammirata used to smoke one Juul pod every couple of days, which is the equivalent to around 10 cigarettes worth of nicotine. Now he...
Doctors were perplexed when their 25-year-old patient, Aubree Butterfield, came in with pneumonia-like symptoms. They weren't immediately able to find the cause of her nonstop vomiting, or why she was coughing up blood. They were surprised when they discovered her condition was linked to her electronic cigarette usage. Butterfield, who was diagnosed with lipoid pneumonia,...
A Connecticut man is suing Juul Labs for causing him to suffer a massive stroke after he became addicted to the company’s products as a teenager. The case marks the first time the e-cigarette company has been sued for a medical issue this severe. Maxwell Berger, 22, developed an addiction to Juul products during...
A Juul representative repeatedly told a ninth-grade classroom that the company's e-cigarette was "totally safe" before showing underage students the device, according to two teenagers who testified under oath to Congress on Wednesday. The comments came at the first of two hearings organized by the House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy to...
Teens Had Symptoms Of Fatigue, Shortness Of Breath, Chest Pain, Cough, Weight Loss Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin treated eight teenagers with severe lung damage all of whom reported vaping in the months prior to being hospitalized. The teens had symptoms of fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain, cough and weight loss. While the cause is unknown at this...
The Food and Drug Administration is launching its first TV ads to fight teen vaping. The FDA's nearly $60 million initiative, called "The Real Cost," includes new commercials featuring street magician Julius Dein using tricks to educate teens on the risks of e-cigarettes. The Centers for Disease Control says more than 1 in 5 high...
My Life, My Quit uses "quitline" to help teens give up tobacco In 2018, over 3.5 million high school students in the United States regularly used e-cigarettes. With numbers growing each year, many wonder how to help at-risk teens stop using tobacco products. Following a San Francisco ban on the sale of e-cigarettes, National Jewish Health — one of the...
‘Pod dealers’ buy the pods online or in stores and then resell them at a slightly higher price to younger users Sophie, a 19-year-old University of Vermont student from Yardley, Pa., makes over $200 a week delivering pizzas and spends a significant chunk of that on a habit that she wishes she had never...
An undercover operation in California found that half of tobacco and vape shops failed to check IDs for teens purchasing e-cigarettes and other nicotine products, despite a state law raising the legal age for purchasing tobacco products to 21. Researchers sent 18- and 19-year-old "decoys" into stores without ID, instructing them to tell the...
A school district in Nebraska will start randomly testing students who take part in extracurricular activities for nicotine, after educators noticed a sharp rise in the use of e-cigarettes, a school official said Monday. The new policy at Fairbury Public Schools reflected the growing recognition nationwide of the public health threat of e-cigarettes. Their...
The use of electronic smoking devices, or “vaping,” remains a problem in East Hawaii high schools, and it’s becoming more difficult to detect, local administrators say. “It is a problem, it is a big problem,” said Hilo High School Principal Bob Dircks. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, e-cigarettes produce an aerosol...
Paul Spear was just started as athletic director at Framingham High School when he heard that students were vaping. All he knew was that a friend mentioned he was using the products to ween off cigarettes. By late 2017, a year later, he was seeing student athletes in his office every week who got...
Two students - at the University of Alabama and Auburn University - have filed a class-action lawsuit against the makers of e-cigarettes, saying the products “prey on youth to recruit replacement smokers for financial gain.” The suit, filed May 22 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama West Division, lists Juul...
A cheerleader and three teenagers are suspected of killing a high school student over $25 worth of vaping products. Lloyd Chavez was shot dead outside his home in Centennial, a city 16 miles south-east of Denver, Colorado, at 9:30 p.m. local time (11:30 p.m. ET) on May 8. According to a statement from Arapahoe County...
A federal judge is siding with public health groups suing the Food and Drug Administration to begin reviewing thousands of e-cigarettes on the U.S. market. The ruling handed down Wednesday in district court states that the agency shirked its legal duty when it postponed reviewing all U.S. vaping products by several years. The American Academy...
In 1994, the nation’s top tobacco executives all testified before Congress that “nicotine is not addictive.” Big Tobacco lied not just to our government, but misled the public for decades on the harms to health caused by cigarettes. Now, 25 years later, they are doing it again. This time, in the form of sleek,...
The video starts with a student pressuring his peer, saying unlike cigarettes, vaping isn't bad for you. Then the scene freezes, and the truth begins. The student breaks away to reveal, actually, vaping is far from a safe alternative. The premise repeats with other common myths about vaping, each immediately debunked. The Mankato high school...
If you ask high school students in Massachusetts about electronic-cigarette use, or vaping, they’ll tell you it’s everywhere. "It screams at you," says Victor, a 17-year-old in Newton. "In the bathrooms, you’ll always see kids hitting JUULs. You’ll always see packs of pods in the trash cans at our schools." JUUL is one of the most...
New study is one of the first to show through urine samples how much nicotine young people are getting from e-cigarettes. Many teens who use e-cigarettes aren’t aware they are inhaling nicotine when they vape, even though they are often taking in high levels of the addictive substance, a new study suggests. Researchers who collected...
Rite Aid said it would remove e-cigarette and vaping products from stores over the next 90 days; stores will continue to sell regular cigarettes Rite Aid Corp. is halting the sale of e-cigarettes in its drugstores, even as it continues to sell traditional cigarettes, taking a different stance on tobacco products than its two...
High schoolers from Brevard County will head to Tallahassee next week to ask lawmakers to impose stricter regulations on vaping companies, to address the surge in discipline problems they've seen in their schools. At Tuesday night's school board meeting, student government leaders presented their plan requesting legislators to require vaping companies to disclose the ingredients...
"They think it is all clean." The trouble started about a year or two ago, back when it all seemed like some sort of a joke, says Andrew Valianti, a junior at Triton Regional High School. It was supposed to be a fad of sorts — a hot trend that would last maybe one school...
District's three middle school health teachers develop, refine curriculum to educate students about habit, its dangers As eighth-grade students in Amy Preston’s health class at Gowana Middle School huddled together in teams at their desks and pored over the decades-old cigarette advertisements that had been placed in front of them to analyze, they slowly...
Jami Scheetz knew that her 15-year-old son, Devon, needed help. His grades were slipping and he had been caught vaping at school so many times that he was on the brink of being expelled. Last fall, at the start of his freshman year, Devon’s school even sent him to the hospital for drug...
Young people across the country gathered today to take a stand against tobacco. In Hawaii, youth from almost every island showed up to the State Capitol to show their support for Senate Bill 1009, which would ban flavored tobacco in Hawaii. Dozens of middle school and high school students sported bright pink shirts and...
Seeking to curb teen vaping, San Francisco officials on Tuesday introduced legislation to ban the sale of electronic cigarettes until the federal government regulates them. The measure, if approved, would be the first of its kind nationally, preventing people from buying e-cigarettes online or at stores in the largest city in northern California, pending the Food and Drug...
Teen vaping is on the rise, and schools are searching for solutions, with some taking disciplinary action or installing vape detectors in bathrooms. Still, the problem has continued to swell. The US Food and Drug Administration announced in November that vaping had increased nearly 80% among high schoolers and 50% among middle schoolers since...
The promise of electronic cigarettes is straightforward: Lifelong smokers can wean themselves off a toxic habit in favor of an alternative that isn’t packed with tobacco and dozens of unsafe carcinogens. But e-cigarettes and vaping products present health concerns of their own, experts say, and that’s due in part to nicotine. That was a point...
Outgoing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb released the agency’s much-anticipated policy restricting e-cigarette sales on Wednesday — designed to tighten sales and eventually remove from the market many of the fruity flavors he’s blamed on fueling “epidemic” levels of teen use. “We think flavored products represent greater risk to youth appeal, so...
A police officer on duty in Talawanda High School was approached by several students in the cafeteria at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 25 showing him a Snapchat post with an apparent threat of school violence. The officer photographed the message and contacted the principal and assistant principals. A police lieutenant was also called in. The...
Cigarettes hooked generations of teenagers. Now e-cigarettes might do the same. I was 15 when I started smoking, and so were most of my friends. We smoked to rebel against our parents but also to identify with them — of course they smoked, even as they told us not to. We smoked because it...
Leading e-cigarette company Juul Labs spurred a "widespread rush" of companies seeking to boost their own nicotine concentrations in order to mirror Juul's success, according to a paper published Thursday in the BMJ journal Tobacco Control. When Juul released its original 5% nicotine pods in the United States in 2015, the majority of competing...
Teens who start vaping are nearly three times more likely to go on to smoke cigarettes than their peers who don’t use any type of tobacco product, a new study finds. The results are alarming for both medical experts — who would rather kids not smoke — and for the e-cigarette industry, which...
Fifteen year-old Luka Kinard began vaping, or smoking e-cigarettes, as a way to handle the anxiety of trying to fit in at his High Point high school. Within six months, he lost interest in school, his friends, his sports teams and his Boy Scouts troop. One of the biggest attractions to vaping for Kinard...
Most of what we know about nicotine addiction in teens, we know from cigarettes. But experts say the technology and chemistry of vaping might pose an entirely different threat. “It turns out that e-cigarette use by kids doesn’t look the same at all,” said Dr. Sharon Levy, director of the Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction...
In the wake of the surgeon general declaring a youth e-cigarette epidemic, Truth Initiative® has expanded its quit-smoking resources to include a first-of-its kind e-cigarette quit program. This innovative and free text message program was created with input from teens, college students and young adults who have attempted to, or successfully, quit e-cigarettes. The...
E-cigarettes may help tobacco smokers quit. But the alluring devices can swiftly induce a nicotine habit in teenagers who never smoked. This is the tale of one person’s struggle. READING, Mass. — He was supposed to inhale on something that looked like a flash drive and threw off just a wisp of a cloud?...
More high school kids are smoking cigarettes as vaping surges, reversing a two-decade-long decline. This year, 8.1 percent of high school students reported smoking cigarettes, up from 7.6 percent last year, according to federal health officials, who asked not to be named because the data haven't been publicly released. The increase is not statistically...
One man's journey through the promise and peril of e-cigarettes In 2015, my now-and-then smoking habit had crept up to two or three cigarettes per day, and a lot more when I was drinking. After one tobacco-laden weekend resulted in a full week of phlegm and coughing, I felt like I had to do...