Hidden In Plain Sight - What You Need to Know About New Vaping Trends

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
From the WA and M Studio on the campus of
Florida A and M University.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
This is Maryfum Radio, a weekly conversation on the education
and research of the medical marijuana being conducted at BAMU.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Hi.

Speaker 4 (00:13):
I'm Heidi Otway, your host for this conversations on Cannabis
Virtual Form, brought to you by the Medical Marijuana Education
and Research Initiative at Florida and M University. In this conversation,
we're talking about the latest vaping products found in schools
and the drug testing tools that detected the products contain

(00:33):
marijuana or other illegal substances. So let's talk and learn
about this subject with our guests. Bobby Beetros is the
CEO of Swabtech, a company that makes a one of
a kind test kit to detect narcotics and vaping devices
and edibles. Is used by law enforcement, governments, the aviation industry,

(00:55):
and also in classrooms and private homes. Bobby, walk to
the form. Tell us more about yourself and swab Tech.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hi, Heidi, thank you very much for having me on it.
Let's see swap Tech has been has been around for
about six years now. We created this company around an
innovation in new testing capability to come up with a new,
safer way to bring detection tests to the masses, which

(01:28):
is something that the average person never had access to before.
Me Specifically, I've been a technologist all my life. I'm
an MIT grad. Have been really jumping from one technology
area to another looking for new leap frog technologies in
those spaces, and that's what got me here with swab

(01:50):
tech is that this is a revolutionary new way of
testing that's now available to everybody in the general public.

Speaker 4 (02:01):
Well, I can't wait to let everyone see how this
product works and what you're doing to help people detect
these kinds of things, you know, illegal substances in vapes.
So to everyone watching, please share the link to this
form on your social media channels so others can learn

(02:22):
about this topic. We also want you to tell us
what you think about this form by completing the survey
that will be posted on Mary's social media pages. Your
name will be entered into a drawing in June twenty
twenty five to when a one hundred dollars gift card
provided by one of Mary's partners. Now, let's start this
conversation on cannabis. So, Bobby, let's start by explaining what

(02:46):
vaping is and why it's increased significantly over the last
few years.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Okay, well, vaping is really just the act of inhaling
an aerosol that's been produced by an electronic device. You know.
These are these electronic devices are called e cigarettes or vappens.
The way they work is the devices will heat this
liquid solution or oil solution that typically contains nicotine or

(03:16):
flavorings or sometimes other chemicals into into a vapor that's inhaled.
So it's it's an electronic cigarette, honestly, is what it is.
It's just instead of burning tobacco, it's burning an extract
or an oil solution and creating the vapor that's been inhaled.
And that's really the revolution in As smoking has declined,

(03:41):
vaping has kind of replaced it and actually has kind
of accelerated because it's been it's been it's been really
popular amongst youth because it's clean. You know, smoking is
stinky and gross, and people don't smoke anymore, but they
ovate because they believe that it's safer for them. It's

(04:03):
more discreete easier to hide. It's it doesn't smell, it's
it's not something that's considered gross. Matter of fact, you know,
women are much much more likely to be vaping than men,
which used to be the opposite in the cigarette das.

Speaker 4 (04:20):
Yeah, So from your perspective, what types of vaping products
are most concerning to you, especially when it comes to
team use.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, okay, So let's just put aside all the risks
of smoking, of smoking these these oils. You know, there's
lung risks to smoking just something that's your flavors, right
or or vape juice as people call them. Let's put

(04:51):
all those risks aside because no one's it hasn't been
around long enough for people to really attach safety percentages
to the act of inhaling of vaporized oil. But what's
really dangerous about them is when they start to infuse
those oils with cannabis products, Okay, And that's where it

(05:13):
starts to get super dangerous. And it's mainly it's mainly
because it's mainly because teens. It's really not safe to
smoke marijuana if you're a teenager. And this is and
this is really simply something that that it is not

(05:33):
hard to discover online. You can go to the internet
and search it up and you'll see it. And the
reason why is because there's a link that's been found
between consumption of high content cannabis products and the developing
adolescent brain. And you know, marijuana use during that period

(05:54):
of development for a person can disrupt the brain development,
and that's been proven and then studies it can lead
to early problems with memory, learning, attention, problem solving. But
there's some serious mental health risks that will happen later
on in life. And you know, people that consume high

(06:19):
content THFC in this age range, they have a very
high increased risk of developing you know, mental health problems
things like anxiety, depression, psychosis, and you know, of course
there's certain individuals that have more of a predisposition to
that than others. But it can also be linked to

(06:39):
early development of schizophrenia. So these are some really serious,
long term mental problems that have been exacerbated by the
power and the strength of today's cannabis products. You know,
back in the seventies, marijuana was not that strong. It
was four or five percent hopefully nowadays, you know, it's

(07:01):
very difficult to find something that's that weak. You know,
the lowest thing you can find is on the order
of thirty percent, but they have products that are seventy
eighty ninety percent strong, and that's really where there's the rate,
the danger in the risk, and any kind of cannabis
or THC product that's consumed by adolescents is really damaging

(07:25):
to their long term mental health.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:28):
Yeah, So I want to share some data that I
pulled up as we were preparing for this form. This
is the twenty twenty four CDC data on vaping in
teens and e cigarettes were most common the most commonly
used tobacco product among middle and high school students in
the US, with one point six three million students using

(07:52):
vaping devices. And this included middle school students and high
school students. And you're doing you're doing work in schools,
So can you share with us what you're seeing in
the schools with the schools that you're working with.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yes, well, let me take us look. Let's go back
a little bit in time to people understand the whole story,
and I'll show you something on my screen here that
kind of starts it off. So this is a Today
Show feature that came around back in twenty eighteen, and

(08:30):
the thing that happened in twenty eighteen that started all
this was the state of Colorado was the first state
in the US to legalize marijuana, and so as soon
as that happened, soon as marijuana got legalized, basically all
the schools in Colorado started having problems. And what were
the problems. There were people bringing bait pens, gummies, candies,

(08:53):
cookies that were marijuana infused to school and that was
the problem. And this was a huge problem these schools had,
and so we were contacted. We weren't even in this
This wasn't an industry for anyone because this wasn't a
problem at the time. We were our products to law
enforcement and basically the schools started using our kids and

(09:15):
they would use our kids to try to identify the
difference between a nicotine pen and a pot pin. And
basically we would show them how with our new test
kits you could identify and detect which one was which,
and it worked on It works on vait pins, it
works on gummies, it works on cookies and candies, and
this was the This was how we got introduced into

(09:37):
this space. It since twenty eighteen, we've been on the
front lines of this problem because we're the only company
that has a product that can detect these kinds of devices.
And so now let's march forward in time till today.
You know, so this is kind of how it was
just starting in twenty eighteen. Today it looks like this.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Oh my goodness, this is a This is one of
our high school customers in Arkansas. And they what they're
showing here is they're showing what they confiscate from students
on campus in one month. And remember this is one
high school one month, So figure a fourth of this
table every week. Now, if you zoom in, you'll see

(10:22):
that the vast majority of this stuff is vapens and cartridges.
That being said, there's gummies, there's prescription pills.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
Over here on the left, there's bongs and pipes and
all kinds of paraphernalia. And this is the problem. This
is the problem that every single school in the country's facing. Now.
It's not just restricted to states that have legalized marijuana,
because it's so easy to get this stuff now that
it's legal in almost half of the states in the country.

(10:51):
Because of that, you can get it on the internet.
You can get it just about anywhere. Now if you
look at this picture, and I was the principal at
this school, I would want to know how many of
these things are drugs and how many of them are
just vapor pins, right, Like the kids always say, Well,

(11:12):
from our experience doing this in thousands of schools around
the country, it's about half on average, So half of
these things have drugs in them on this picture, and
that's and the kinds of things they have is they
have obviously marijuana, they have synthetic cannabis, which is another

(11:33):
big problem, and then they also oftentimes have harder drugs
like amphetamines, sometimes even fentanyl. I know everyone's heard about
that problem where people have overdosed from fentanyl pens. So
it's a very very serious problem, and it's one that
is really growing amongst the young people in our country.

(11:56):
You know, they've really lashed onto vaping and then quick discovered,
oh look, you can buy cartridges that contain you know, drugs,
and nobody will know I'm smoking drugs because it's just
a bake pin. And that's the real problem.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
Okay, you know you're talking.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Please keep it's just going to show you the future,
because the future is now happening here in California, and
the future is products like this and.

Speaker 4 (12:24):
This is what I was about to ask, what do
these discrete products that you don't even know it's a
vate pin.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
So here's an example of these. These are all vake pins.
They now make vaypins that look like car Key fox
that you can smoke out of. They look like pens
that are actually functional and right, magic markers, chapstick containers.
All of these things are vappins. But there are also

(12:52):
these other devices they make USB sticks that are also
vay pins. So now you have a challenge of identifying
something as a vape pen first of all, before you
can even decide is it drugs or not drugs. So
you have another layer of problem coming, which is this
this concealment of vaping devices as a function, you know,

(13:15):
in terms of other physical things that are common. Now,
this is a California company selling these things in this
in this country, you know, and they'll sell them anywhere
in the country. Why because they don't sell the cartridges.
They just sell the devices. If you want to get
a cartridge, you can go get cartridges pretty much anywhere

(13:37):
on the internet. You can get you know, traditional marijuana
cartridges online from from websites like here in San Diego,
there's a website called weed Maps. I can just go
on and order whatever I want and they'll deliver it
right to my house. Now, this isn't happening in Florida
yet because Florida hasn't legalized recreational mirror marijuana and they do,

(14:02):
that's what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
To say, if we do.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
I do hope it's an it because every state that's
legalized it has all these great plans, but it never
really pans out because I'll tell you, even here in California,
you know it's legal, there's official dispensaries to sell it,
but the majority of the market is still sold off
market in other words, through the illegal channels like gray market,

(14:31):
traditional dealers, because the taxes just push it that way.
So it's a really big problem that's coming when you
have devices like this and automatic delivery of cartridges of
whatever kind. And then in some states, actually in almost
every state there are synthetics. Yeah, you don't just have

(14:53):
to be in a state that has legalized marijuana recreationally
because what has happened is to get around the definition
and the law of what is marijuana. You know, the
marijuana law is defined very specifically as Delta nine THCHC,
which is the component of the cannabis plant that's psychoactive. Okay,

(15:18):
But as we all know, CBD is another component, and
so is and so is hemp. Yeah, those aren't psychoactive,
and so those are legal, okay. So in trying to
make illegal Delta nine thc, what the industry has done
is they've now made synthetic cannabis where they take hemp

(15:41):
or they take CBD from the plant and then they
run it through a chemical laboratory process that changes its
structure so that it's very very similar in structure to
Delta nine THC marijuana, but technically it's not marijuana, but
it's still psychoactive and in any cases it's much more

(16:01):
powerful than traditional marijuana. And those products are legal, and
those products can be sold that in local vapor smoke store.
I mean, if I even look on again on the internet,
can you find Delta eight products in vape stores and
smoke shops in Florida? And the answer is yes.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
Oh yeah, they're they're everywhere in Florida.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
It's legal everywhere.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
Everywhere.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
You can buy it smoke shops, vape stores, even convenience stores. Yeah,
I mean, imagine going into seven eleven and purchasing you know,
the equivalent of marijuana, you know. I mean that's really
what's very, very difficult about these these synthetic cannabis products
is that they're just legal. And that's been a problem

(16:48):
with how the government tried to make camp legal but
at the same time keep marijuana illegals created this big
problem and then those things are very very dangerous to
kids too.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
Yeah, So in your view, what can parents in schools
do more effectively to reduce access and to also identify
early use of cannabis and vaping in teams.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Well, let's see. What we do know is that the
drug prevention efforts that we have today are not super effective, okay,
because we've seen an explosion and growth of this amongst
our teams. The real problem is it's hard to know,
you know, if it's hard to get early detection of

(17:33):
someone who's at risk that needs help and needs to
learn how dangerous this is today, and usually that only
happens when there's some sort of an event, you know.
So what we've found is that in the schools, you know,
I'll go back to my picture that I had up
on the screen here before. If I have if I

(17:54):
have found kids with these, each one of these devices
is tagged to a kid that you fund it with,
right unless it was just found out in the field.
But if I find these and I test them, and
I can say, hey, this one vayppin is positive for marijuana,
and that one vaypin I found on Joe's person, well,

(18:18):
Joe's at risk. He could beginning, he could be hurting
himself for life, and he doesn't even realize it. I
need to go help him and educate him and try
to convince him about Hey, man, I know it's not
hurting you today, but you know you may wake up
one day and you know it might lose your memory
or have some mental break, you know, and you don't
really understand that that's a potential thing because no one's

(18:40):
telling you. And so testing and identifying these devices is
a very big part of prevention because now you can
understand if somebody's at risk or not, and you can
focus your drug prevention efforts towards that person. So that's
how our test gets are used. In school settings. It's
same thing as in employment, like worker settings in the house.

(19:04):
You know, we also have the same kind of products
that are available for parents. And you know, this is
a common problem if you're a parent, you have a
suspicion that your kid is doing something, maybe you see
something in his room, or you know, he smokes a vpen,
but you don't believe him that it's just a NI cigarette. Yeah,
wouldn't you want to know before you have a conversation

(19:26):
and accusing him of that? You know? And currently the
only products available to use as tools are things like
you'urine tests, you know, or hair tests, and it's very
difficult to test your kid like that if you're not sure.
You know, you want to have a little knowledge beforehand
so you can kind of handle that situation in the

(19:47):
most respectable way possible because you don't want to damage
your relationship with your son or daughter.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
Now, is that the.

Speaker 4 (19:52):
Same approach in the schools like, you know, like public
schools and private schools that maybe doing drug testing? I mean,
is is that common around?

Speaker 2 (20:01):
It's more common in private schools. Private schools have a
policy that they can implement and sometimes some private schools
will have an annual drug test.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
Tell me more about that.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Well, those are tests where they actually will test the person,
you know, they're they're going to give them a urine
test or a hair test.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
We're talking about students and teachers or just students.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
I know they have student programs.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
Yeah, okay, I'm.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
Not positive about the teachers programs or not, but they
definitely have student programs at private schools. Not all private schools,
but some. They're trying to identify people that have been
using drugs again so they can you know, focus their
prevention efforts on them. In public schools, it's a very
difficult thing to do to do a urine test on

(20:47):
a student because it's you're testing their body, right, you're
testing their fluids. It's a privacy thing. It's very it's
much more difficult to do a human test unless there's
a serious event of someone you know, distributing at school
or possibly or possibly distributing fentanyl laced products. You know,

(21:09):
those things are treated a little more seriously. So testing
the student is is harder to do in the public
school setting, more easy to do, but still difficult in
a private setting. And so so they don't really have
you know, a parent. You can test your kid however
you want, because it's your kid. But you get into

(21:31):
these you know, public government kind of school districts, and
you know, they don't have the rights to just do
that without the parents involvement, et cetera. So that's what
makes testing the person difficult. When you when you try
to test their belongings for drugs, that's much easier, much

(21:51):
less policy challenges over testing people's belongings because every school
has a policy no drives off cans exactly.

Speaker 4 (22:02):
And also, I don't know hopefully a lot of folks
know this, but having recreational cannabis in Florida near a school,
I mean, it's illegal at the federal level. You cannot
have it. It's a federal offense to have recreational illegal
cannabis on the school property.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
It's illegal to have it if you're a minor anywhere.

Speaker 4 (22:27):
Right that part too so, but it I mean, in general,
it is it is a federal offense.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Right now, the last thing people want to do is
arrest students and arrest miners over simple possession when they're
just you know, starting to experiment with these kinds of things.
The goal of all these programs is nonpunitive. That's the key.
You know. The goal is to identify people that need help,

(22:55):
identify people that you want to try to educate and
change the path they're on to not escalate into other
more serious drugs like ecstasy and cocaine and you know,
all these other things that are you know, one step
above marijuana. And you know, that's really what these kinds
of programs are about. They're tools. Tools for the parents,

(23:19):
tools for the caregivers, tools for the principles anyone responsible
for others, especially miners. They're tools for them to identify
risky behavior and be able to then use that knowledge
to go help these people. And that's really what these
things are about.

Speaker 4 (23:37):
Yeah, so your company has created, you know, drug tests
for all kinds of illegal products, including marijuana. So maybe
it'd be a good time for you to show us
the vappin tests that you've developed that's being used in
schools and other environments so people can see how simple
it is, and then you can explain, you know, what's

(23:59):
the difference between what you're doing versus a.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
Traditional drug test. So let's let's do a little demo.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Here, all right, you just change my screen here, there
we go. Okay, So let's see so what I have
here on this on this little display here, as I
have a marijuana gummy, a baight pin, and a little

(24:24):
bag of some cannabis plant material. And so let's say
I found this baight pen on a student or I
found I got it out of my kids room, and
I want to know. I want to know if it's
if it's got marijuana on it or not or in it.
I could take out my test hit, which is this
little card. It's a printed card that has a little

(24:46):
ink spot on it that we create which has got
a chemical reactive ink m H. Then the kit comes
with a suave that's prewetted that I can use to
collect a surface sample residue. Now, if someone smokes a vapepen,
what happens is when you smoke out of the mouthpiece,
small particles of oil are left as residu residue on

(25:10):
that baypen's mouthpiece. So if I want to test this thing,
all I have to do is swap it to collect
some of those oil particles. And then I go to
the card and I mix it with the printed reagent
on the card and look for a color change that's red,
which in the case positive And as you can see,

(25:32):
it's positive.

Speaker 4 (25:34):
Wow, So that's a positive test for cannabis in that
vate pen.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
That's correct. It's as simple as that. It's discreete it
doesn't harm the thing. I don't have to break it apart.
And now let's say I'm a parent. I've just done
the test. I confirm my son's vakepen is definitely marijuana,
and I put it back, and then I go and
talk to him later that evening. Maybe I even do
this test in front of him after he denies it.
Now I can really win. Okay, as a parent or

(26:00):
as a caregiver. Let's see gummies, because candies are a
huge problem that people.

Speaker 4 (26:06):
Edibles are a big big We've had a lot of
incidents of kids over consuming edibles and you know, having
some reasons.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
The reason that happens is because when you eat cannabis products,
it's your liver that converts it into your bloodstream, and
so what happens is it takes longer than smoking it,
and so kids will eat these can't do you feel
anything yet? Do you feel anything yet? No? I don't

(26:35):
feel anything. Let's do another one. Okay, let's do another one.
And that's how that happens is they end up taking
so much marijuana in that eventually it it really need
to go to the hospital and get their stomach pumps. Yeah,
let's say I want to test this gummy. This is
a gummy candy and.

Speaker 4 (26:54):
It looks like a regular piece of candy you would get,
you know, the store.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, So let's say I would go and I would
swab the candy directly. And what I'm doing really is
I'm trying to get the into the oil particles that
are inside every candy or every brownie or every drink.
That's really what we're looking for. I'll just show you
the swab. You can see how it actually took some
of the food coloring off of the candy, because it's
now green. If you see that. Now, I'll go and

(27:23):
mix that with again the card and I'm again looking
for the same red color to show a positive and
you can see even though it started as green, it's
now red. Yeah, because that's that's marijuana. And then the
final thing I'll show you is even if you find
like an empty bagging, you can actually detect what was

(27:45):
in it before if you think it was marijuana. M
So I have this little bag and it has just
a trace amount of marijuana left at the very bottom
of the bag. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and just
swab the side of the bag, and I'm not going
to go down to the bottom. Just the inside of
this bag. I'm gonna swab because there's obviously nothing there,

(28:09):
it's just the bag. And then I'm gonna test that
and again you can see it when positive right away,
so I can actually even identify an empty bag that
used to have marijuana. Okay, So we're collecting these residues
off the surfaces, and that's what makes it very, very

(28:31):
powerful to be able to test any of these kinds
of devices that we've just seen to see if they're
actually being used to consume drugs, you know. And we
have other tests like our fentanyl tests and cocaine tests
and medical tests which can also be used on dape devices,
because unfortunately, people are making those kind of ape pens

(28:53):
now too, and those are getting more common. But this
is the this is the tool that we make to
help out with the whole issue of minors consuming marijuana.
And the only other thing I'd like to say is
all the parents and all the adults out there m
changed my screen back. You know, everyone that's that's thinking

(29:17):
about voting to legalize marijuana. They need to think really
hard about it because most of the people that are
thinking about when the vote comes up for and I
know Florida did not pass it recently, which is a
very good thing, but most people when they look about
voting for it, they're really thinking, you know, when I

(29:38):
was a kid, didn't really hurt me and I turned
out okay. You know, let them experiment, right, That's kind
of the thought process that most people have who are
adults in this age, because when we grew up, it
wasn't that bad, it wasn't that dangerous. But that is
that is the biggest policy. They don't realize because a
lot of those adults don't smoke with marijuana anymore and

(30:00):
they don't know. But it's so much stronger now that
it's gone into a whole other level of danger that
didn't exist when all of us were growing up, which
is why many of the states they don't have a
problem with legalizing it, and they do so without a
real solid plan on how to prevent harm to the

(30:22):
community from having this product available that's only supposed to
be used by adults. It's illegal for miners, but what
happens miners get their hands just like beer and cigarettes.
It's no different. You know, you're not allow to have
those either if you're a miner, but they do, ye know.
And this is the problem too, And how are you
going to solve this problem that you've just created by

(30:44):
legalizing marijuana in your state? You know, nobody has that
all thought out. And I just the audience should know
that it's not like it was in the old days.
This is a new world and lots more danger associated
with these kinds of things and used to be. And
so don't just think that legalizing is not going to

(31:06):
create problems, because you can look anywhere else and look
at you know, the pictures I've shown you today. This
happens every day all.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
Over the country.

Speaker 4 (31:15):
Yeah, I want to go back to the beginning of
the program where you talked about how you know, parents
may not recognize. You showed all these vape pins, right,
all these different vaping devices. Then you showed these devices
that look like everyday items that you you know, I
would find in my purse, you know, someone would find,
you know, just in every day homes. So if I'm

(31:38):
a parent, or I'm an educator, a teacher, or an
administrator in a school, how do how do you know
that whether that's a vape pin or not, what are
what are some of the telltale signs that, hey, that
young person is vaping.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, Well, the first thing I would say is what
they're finding at school today is what's been reported. I
saw so and so with this, or an actual teacher
or someone on the staff sees something. That's how they're

(32:15):
finding them today.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
What that means is they're only like that table full
of vape pins I showed you. That means there's a
whole bunch more that they haven't found, right, Because what
kids will do is they'll go to the one place
that's safe at a school, the bathrooms put cameras, you
can't put audio recording, nothing in a bathroom. And so

(32:37):
what they'll do they'll go in the bathroom, smoke their vapepen,
exhale it into the toilet at the same time they
flush the toilet. And you know, schools have industrial strength
toilets that pull that air right down, and nobody will
be the wiser and they'll go in packs.

Speaker 4 (32:54):
So smoking in the bathroom still happens, but it's now
vaping in the bathroom is.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
What they're saying. That's right, and and what's what some
some companies are starting are starting to deploy vap detectors,
which are like smoke alarms, but smoke alarms for vape devices,
and they'll basically identify the presence of the vape smoke
in the bathroom and send out alerts to the staff

(33:19):
who can then come in person and try to find
the people that are in their vaping. Now, what some
kids will also do is they'll carry two vape pens.
They'll carry one with marijuana in it and one without,
so that if they get caught, they cough up the
one without and don't hand over the one with with
you know, no one thinks they're going to have two, right,

(33:42):
So there's a lot of tricks that the kids use.
Now in some schools or that we've seen where they've
actually deployed the vape detectors. We've seen the in you know,
the number of things they find go up by a
factor of ten. So imagine that table times ten if
they were actually detecting everything. And that's you know, that's

(34:04):
so even what we're doing to identify the use of it,
if it's only just by you know, by witnesses, you know,
we're catching they're catching a lot, but there's still a
lot more. The problems much bigger. It's just the surface
because there's a lot of people you're not catching.

Speaker 4 (34:22):
Yeah, so what's your advice to parents and school administrators?
And when it comes to two vage thing, I mean,
we talked earlier that it has grown significantly. We saw
the reasons why. So then, you know, I'm a parent,
I'm like, Okay, what am I supposed to do?

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Well? You need to be active. Don't just take your
son or daughter's word for it when they tell you, oh,
those are just candies I got for my friend. That's
why they're not in a store wrapper. Or oh I'm
holding this for my friend because his mom's me, you know,
or whatever. Yeah, you know, these are the kind of
things where you just have to be be a little

(35:00):
bit suspicious of something that you think. You're obviously suspicious.
If you think there's a problem, to do something about it,
you know, don't just don't just let it go. Find
ways to talk to your kids about it and educate
them about the danger. In schools the same thing. I mean,
you know, if you're if you believe someone has a
problem with drugs, don't ignore it. You know, get involved,

(35:24):
even if you don't have proof or don't see something specifically,
but you see they feel like they're impaired, you know,
have a discussion with them about it. At a minimum,
that's that's a way to get the conversation started. And
if you see something, definitely act and there has to
be some sort of action associated with that that incident

(35:48):
that you found. You know, like schools will punish kids
with suspensions, et cetera for having faith pens in the
first place, which is okay, that's to punishment, but that
doesn't solve the problem if you're not also helping them,
you know. Like so, so maybe what they should be
doing is simultaneously having them take this, but they're going

(36:09):
to be on a week's worth the suspension will make
that week an education week for drugs. You know, let's
let's let's try teaching more than punishing, because punishing is
not going to solve the problem. But you need to
teach them, you know. Sometimes we've had kids, We've had
kids that were accused of vaping marijuana and the parents

(36:31):
used our kids to prove that they didn't and get
them reinstated back in school because they got a negative
result on that DAP as opposed to a positive. So
there's there's good uses for this. Other kids say to
their they use it. Oh, my parents have they drug
tests for me, and so I'd love to party with
you guys, but I can't because my parents are going

(36:53):
to test me and then it's so it's a way
for those kids to not have to deal with the
peer pressure, that's right. So there's lots of positives about
being active and testing that will help your kids get
through this complicated time in their lives. And it is
when they're older to do drugs later. I mean, that's
their personal choice. They're now adults. You know, the medical

(37:16):
risks are lower for them, I guess at that age.
So but when you're responsible for them, you need to
be active.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Yeah, yeah, Well, thank you for those closing thoughts, Bobby.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
I mean, this was such a rich and educational discussion,
and I want to thank you for being a guest
on this. Conversations on Cannabis Virtual Form brought to you
by the Medical Marijuana Education and Research Initiative at Florida
and M University. Thank you to everyone watching this program.
Tell us what you think about this form by completing
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(37:50):
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you to go to Florida the Florida Department of Health
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obtain legal medical marijuana card in the state of Florida.

(38:11):
And I also want to encourage you to go to
Florida and University's merried website where they actually have an
education model about teens and vaping and cannabis. So please
It's at Mary dot FAMU dot edu so you can
learn more about this topic. You can also learn about
MARY and its educational programs and also about cannabis use

(38:33):
in Florida. Thanks everyone.

Speaker 1 (38:38):
The views and opinions of our invited guests are not
necessarily the views and opinions of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical
University or the Medical Marijuana Education and Research Initiative.