November 14, 2019 • 45 mins
It unfolded right under our noses, in classrooms, on school buses, in locker rooms after sports practice—millions of kids got addicted to nicotine within the span of just a few years, thanks to the spread of vaping devices like Juul. This fall, the scope of the issue came into shocking focus as headline after headline documented the skyrocketing number of vaping-related illnesses. How exactly did we get here—and what can we do about it now? On this episode of Next Question, Katie talks to people on all sides of the issue, including a concerned high schooler who became an activist after watching his friends battle nicotine addictions; a mom who worries about her daughter’s Juul use now that she’s away at college; a journalist who started covering the trend long before the rest of the media caught on; and some of the country’s foremost addiction experts about the best ways to help teenage vapers—and keep kids away from e-cigarettes in the first place.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Next Question with Katie Kuric is a production of I
Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curic,
and welcome to Next Question, where we try to understand
the complicated world we're living in and the crazy things
that are happening by asking questions and by listening to
people who really know what they're talking about. At times,
it may lead to some pretty uncomfortable conversations, but stick
(00:24):
with me, everyone, let's all learn together. Whether you call
it Julian vaping or using East cigarettes. By the time
we even realized it was happening, it was already an epidemic.
But we're going to begin with America's vaping crisis. The
alarming update today from the CDC vaping related illnesses and
(00:47):
deaths continue to climb across the US. He sees updating
on the numbers of the lung illnesses associated with vaping.
They are now up to and twenty six deaths across
twenty one states. Now. That's up from about one eighty
last week and eighteen deaths. So this continues to grow
and it continues to impact middle and high school kids
(01:08):
across the country. I'm sixteen years old. I've been dueling
during class and jeweled pretty much every moment where I
wasn't in class For those who have missed the onslaught
of headlines. Jewels, babes, or e cigarettes are small, battery
powered handheld devices used to inhale aerosol produced by heating
(01:32):
a pod full of liquid that often contains nicotine flavorings
and other chemicals. Tobacco companies have been developing them since
the mid sixties, but they didn't hit the market until
two thousand seven and didn't really become widely used until
just a few years ago. Initially, they were marketed as
a way to help adults quit smoking, but their hip
(01:54):
advertising and candy like flavors like bubble Gum, mango and
grape entice a lot of kids. The FDA is holding
a hearing this morning to address the alarming spike in
teen vaping. Most East Sig brands contain nicotine salts, which
exit the blood string quickly, triggering cravings, and that means
(02:15):
they're highly addictive. Jewel, the most popular in the category,
accounted for just two percent of the market in two
thousand sixteen. Three years later, the company captured nearly seventy
of the market, with its sexy, sleek and discreet design,
jewel quickly became the iPhone of e Siggs. I'm fourteen
(02:36):
years old and I'm used the jewel. I'm fifteen years
old and I am a jewel user. I'm fourteen and
I've been using a jewel for nine months. Because babes
were marketed as less dangerous than cigarettes, many young users
didn't even realize they contain nicotine until they were already hooked.
All of my friends, like all my best friends are
(02:58):
like addicted to It's just a part of my life
now that like, I know it's bad, but I can't stop.
The number of people smoking cigarettes has reached record lows,
but now we have a new generation of nicotine addicts.
So how did this happen? That's my next question, and
perhaps more importantly, what can we do about it? The
(03:20):
first thing I observed was that whenever I go to
the bathroom in the stalls, there would be these plastic squares,
and at the beginning I didn't really know what it was,
and then I realized that it was the cartridges from
the Jewel. Two years ago, Jack Waxman, then a junior
at spar Sale High School outside New York City watched
the vaping epidemic unfold firsthand. It was January, and what
(03:42):
I noticed was that kind of over the ensuing months,
the number of kids that were in the bathroom jeweling
and the amount of jewel pods left kind of continued
to increase, and it felt like jewel was kind of
spreading like wildfire amongst my friends and amongst the entire school,
And like so many at the time, he didn't know
what to make of this new trend. It was something
(04:02):
that I hadn't really experienced before. When I was a
freshman of sophomore, bathrooms and schools were places of education
and if any kids were going to be doing drugs,
it would be on the weekend. But I think what
the jewel did is it took kids and kind of
flipped their life backwards and forwards. It's really a twenty
four hour, seven day a week addiction in a way
that many other drugs aren't. And what they did is
(04:23):
it took bathrooms and classrooms and turned them into places
to basically just hit the jewel and fulfill your nicotine addiction.
You made a p s a called Jewelers against Jewel
that went viral and you haven't stopped. You're now a
sophomore at Cornell and the founder of Students Against Nicotine.
How did this problem get so big so fast? And
(04:45):
do agree that it's an epidemic? Yes, So we called
an epidemic in the video last May, and the Surgeon
General called it an epidemic last November. This is what
it is as an epidemic. UM rates went from ten
percent in one year of youth that vape. And that's
the large a single year increase of a drug and
recorded history. And that's not just where I'm from, It's
in every single school because nicotine doesn't discriminate UM and
(05:07):
every single school, every single state, they're experiencing it, just
like where I'm from. What motivated you to shoot this
p s A in the first place. After my junior year,
in my summertime, I was an intern for Chuck Schumer
in the city, and as an intern, I got to
write a policy paper, and a lot of my friends
chose to write about gun control, climate change, very noble issues,
but I just decided to write mine about the jewel
(05:29):
because it was something that I had seen a bit
during my spring year and what I found it was crazy.
I I found that in two thousand nine, Congress band
flavored cigarettes and put all these regulations on cigarettes as
part of the Tobacco Act, but all this stuff was exempted.
These cigarettes were exempted from this regulation. And I also
researched nicotine and found that nicotine, the same thing that
was in cigarettes in the twentieth centuries now in eat
(05:50):
cigarettes in the twenty first century. And I presented my
findings to Senator Schumer and he was so blown away
that he invited me up to do a press conference
with him. He encouraged me, and the whole staff encouraged
me to continue with it. So I had the idea
to make this video and basically recruited some of my
best friends who were struggling with this, and they opened
up and they were so courageous to tell their stories.
And what's happening now is parents understand the problem, and
(06:13):
the younger kids when they're watching his video and classrooms
and other places, they're hearing the stories of these older kids,
and they're basically saying, these older kids regret that they
started jeweling. This is not a cool thing. It's just
a flash drive. It's a loving finger, and this is
not something I want to be doing. Cigarettes are so
stigmatized right now in our country, kids would never pick
up a cigarette. But we're starting to do right now
(06:33):
is we're starting to stigmatize these cigarettes in the same
way that cigarettes are today. When Jack and I sat
down for this interview, it was at the end of August,
and the news linking vaping to a variety of health issues,
even deaths hadn't broken. Many parents and young vapors were
unaware of the dangers. I spoke to one person who
(06:54):
said that their friends were buying jewel for their kids
because they thought that the jewel is a safe alternative
to cigarettes, And now we know that's completely ludicrous. But
I think what we have to do is just continue
to educate parents about what's actually going on and that
these products not only have these crazy, you know, long
term consequences that researchers are looking at right now, but
they rewire the prefrontal cortex in ways that drugs like
(07:16):
cocaine and cigarettes do. It's not a harmless thing. When
I think parents are starting to seething at now, and
for a lot of kids, unfortunately it's too late, but
for millions of other kids, this is a perfect time to,
you know, get these prevention mechanisms out of education and
then also trying to get kids to think about what
they could be doing instead. That was easier said than done.
They didn't continue vaping just to be cool. They were addicted.
(07:40):
Let me ask you about some of the kids, your
friends who you featured in the video. Were they able
to get help? Are they still struggling? So four friends
in my video are still vaping um and it's not
like they didn't try to quit. I want to say,
like I'm surprised, but I'm not right because it's Nicotine
is one of the us addictive drugs in the world,
(08:01):
and that's the reason why they made the video, because
we know how insidious nicotine is, and anyone that smoked
in the past cigarettes or has friends that smoke cigarettes,
it's the same thing. Jack knew early what everyone else
would soon find out. Jewel was in the hot seat.
Within months of this interview, their CEO, Kevin Burns, would
be replaced by an executive from tobacco giant Altria. The
(08:24):
CEO of Jewel apologized in essence. Recently, I guess to
a family who had a child who was addicted, what
did you make of that apology. It's not gonna do anything, right,
I don't know what to say. You thought the words
were hollow. It doesn't do anything for the three million
kids that I've already got addicted to the practs. It
(08:45):
doesn't do anything for the parents, doesn't do anything for us. Besides,
you create noise that won't move the issue forward at all.
And it's just that's really all you can say about it.
It's not even a story. Three million kids are addicted. Mhm.
Where did you get that number? C D, C F
D A, all these you know, public health agencies, they
(09:06):
run these studies and those are the numbers that are
out there today. In addition to the flavors, manufacturers seemed
to be pretty effective at social media. How big an
impact has that had? In sixteen, that's when Jewels social
media was kind of insane. They were featuring like twenty
year old models with you know, cool photos, And there
(09:29):
was this crazy study done by the Stanford about how
Jewels marketing in those two years compared to Marlborough and
other big tobacco companies, and it was practically identical. So
Jewel basically spent millions of dollars putting these it's it
was the vaporized advertisement. It was all over Time Square
of these you know, hit models with all these crazy colors,
(09:50):
and they used social media to get kids interested in
the products. You can't be doing that. That's just not okay. Well,
thank you so much, Jack, Thank you so much for
having me on. Jack wasn't the only one sounding the alarm. Next,
we'll talk with one of the first journalists to report
on the teenage babing epidemic, as well as the doctor
(10:13):
who blew the whistle on the hidden nicotine levels of
the cigarettes. This was just one of those stories that
it felt like everywhere I turned and everyone I talked to,
they were talking about this. They were worried about their kids,
or they were kids, you know, children are friends of
mine who were talking about this. Last year, New York
Times reporter Kate Cernaki wrote a bunch of articles that
covered the vaping crisis in high schools and middle schools
(10:36):
across the country, and what she uncovered shocked her as
much as her readers. It was really one of those
things that you found at every socio economic level. Geographically,
it was everywhere California, Rhode Island, Florida. I mean, it
was just any when you talked to agreed that this
was a problem. So it was happening almost in every state.
This is happening in Middle America, and not just on
(10:57):
the coast, not just urban centers. Absolutely, it was everywhere,
and it was girls and boys, which I think surprised
school administrators as well. What was shocking about it to
me was that it had come up on them so quickly.
It really was. These things had appeared in the fall,
and I guess it was and suddenly by spring it
was just everywhere, and the schools did not know what
to do. They were completely unprepared. I think that for
(11:19):
a lot of kids, you know, we've raised them to
understand that drinking and driving is bad, and cigarettes are
bad and they're ugly, but vaping, but jewel in particular,
came across as kind of a clean thing to do,
you know. It wasn't messy like cigarettes. Almost invariably the
schools I talked to would say, you know, a kid
comes into my office and says, you know, I've caught
someone jeweling, and I said, would you smoke a cigarette?
(11:39):
The kid would be horrified at the idea of smoking
a cigarette, but vaping somehow seemed cleaner to them. It
didn't seem addictive, it didn't seem like an ugly thing
to do or something that was going to make your
teeth look bad or make you smell bad. And a
lot of kids, when I spoke to them, they would
have arguments with me about oh no, there's no there's
no nicotine and jewel. So I think there was a
lot of misunderstanding about what exactly it was. You opened
(12:01):
your first story with a boy from Cape Elizabeth, Maine
confiding in his vice principle tell us a little bit
about that conversation. So this was a student who had
been caught vaping. I think not once, maybe not even twice,
but maybe a third time. I can't remember, but it
was several times. And so the principle was saying, you know, what,
what is it like? You want to, you know, you
want to understand a teenager why they're misbehaving. And the
(12:23):
kid kids said, I can't stop. That was his line,
I can't stop. And this was really what was alarming schools.
This must be so disruptive, Kate, when it comes to
teaching and learning with kids not being able to concentrate.
You know, I know that they're calling bathrooms jeweling lounges
with toilets. I mean, how how much of a problem
(12:44):
is this creating in terms of actually doing the job
schools are supposed to be doing. It's been really huge.
I mean, in California, I talked to one high school
that had to close two bathrooms so that no more
than one student could go into the bathroom at a
time because they were going to share jewels. You know.
One thing that was interesting to me was that schools
felt like this had become such a disruption that they
were actually now treating it not as a disciplinary problem,
(13:06):
but is the medical problem right where they needed to intervene.
And so one of the schools in Colorado that I
spoke to said that there was a young woman who
came in and they gave her a treatment plan to
try to kick the jewel and part of her treatment
plan was standing in the back of the classroom shaking
her foot because it was she just needed to get
that anxious energy out. So I think schools are really
struggling to figure out is this a disciplinary problem. Is
(13:27):
it a disciplinary problem where they need to expel kids
or suspend kids, or is this primarily a health issue
and do they just need to get these kids some
kind of treatment. What needs to happen in your view, Well,
I do think you know, look, I think we need
to understand that this generation, as I said, has been told,
there are so many things they can't do. You know,
we've raised them in such a bubble. In many ways,
you've tried to preserve their perfect health, and so I
(13:49):
think we need to give them some education around vaping
and around nicotine in particular. I think we were very
good at saying that cigarettes cause cancer, and it was
the tar and the cigarettes, right, it was the smoke,
it was all those chemicals. They didn't understand that nicotine
was also bad for you, and in this case, it's
getting them hooked. We also don't know all the chemicals
that are in vaping devices, So I think really education
(14:11):
is a huge part. I think a lot of kids,
in particular, if they understood the chemicals that are in
these devices, they would look at this and think, I
wouldn't you know, I want that in my sunscreen, much
less in my lungs. What kind of chemicals are in
these besides nicotine? Well, there's uh, some studies have found propylene, glycol,
glycerol um. There's one chemical called I think it's a
(14:32):
dia setal. I'm not sure how you say it, but
it's It creates popcorn lung, which has been really obviously
very dangerous and scary. But the thing that struck me
there was a there was an article in the journal
Pediatrics I believe it was in March of seen and
it found elevated levels of five carcinogenic compounds in the
urine of students who vaped. We've done so much research
on tobacco and on cigarettes, we know what's in them.
(14:54):
We don't know a lot about vaping devices. We haven't
studied them over the long terms. We don't know what
the long effects are because it's so new. And to
that end, parents are slightly clueless, aren't they. I mean,
I'm I'm clueless. I actually our team went out and
they bought me a vape. It looks a little like
a cross between a big lighter and a thumb drive, right,
(15:15):
I mean, it's really small. It's then this is again
the double edged sword of the jewel, which is that
it's designed so that someone who wants to quit smoking
can take a hit of the jewel and have something
that gives them the same you know, buzz of a cigarette, right,
because it's a huge dose of nicotine. But that same
thing is going to give a kid who's never smoked
before that huge dose of nicotine. So there's the addiction
(15:36):
is going to come faster. They're eighteen cigarettes in that
eighteen cigarettes in a pod. Right. The other in citious
problem with vapy, kids were absolutely clueless about what they
were inhaling. We made a survey, an anonymous survey which
we gave to just over five kids in our clinical
(15:57):
practice over the course of a year, and the survey
was based on other national surveys with standard questions about
their use of tobacco, electronic cigarettes, and marijuana and so forth.
And then we also collected from some of those kids.
We collected urine for what's called biomarker of nicotine, so
it reflects the nicotine that they're getting in their body.
(16:18):
Dr Rachel Boykin is an Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics
at Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, and
she has been doing extensive research on kids and vaping.
We wanted to know if what they were saying was
matched in the urine. But we also wanted to get
a kind of a sense of how much nicotine they
(16:39):
were being exposed to because this kind of study hadn't
been done before. So did you find that some of
the kids on the first question weren't honest or didn't
realize that they were being exposed to nicotine? We found
that in general, kids who used electronic cigarettes were truthful
about what they said. They said they used them, and
we saw the nicotine byproduct than their urine. But did
(17:01):
they appreciate the fact that they were being exposed to
not all of them. So when we asked them, does
your electronic cigarette have nicotine in it? Some of them
said I don't know or know when. In fact, in
their urine we saw that marker of nicotine cotnein, which
said that they actually were exposed to it. So it
didn't mean they were necessarily being dishonest, they just didn't
understand correct. And what did you find in terms of
(17:24):
the level of nicotine that they were getting in their
bodies through the cigarettes? Number one, that they were getting
levels that are comparable, in some cases even higher than
kids who used cigarettes. We also found that kids who
used the e cigarettes more frequently, like every day, higher levels,
which kind of makes sense. We also found that the
(17:46):
kids who were using what we call the ponds like Jewel,
which is the latest generation and the most popular of
them and also has the most nicotine of all the cigarettes,
those kids also had the highest levels, So it kind
of makes sense. But it put some objective data, if
you will, into kind of what we thought was happening.
So you weren't necessarily surprised. Where you concerned when you
(18:09):
saw these levels in these young kids? Absolutely well. Nicotine
is bad for a number of reasons. Nicotine in and
of itself, we know has bad effects on a teenager's brain.
Teenagers brains are not actually developed until about agent It
can have effects on your ability to learn and so
(18:30):
on cognition. It can affect anxiety, caused depression. Just by itself,
nicotine is dangerous, but nicotine is also extremely addictive. It's
the thing that causes people to be addicted to tobacco cigarettes,
and so the concern, although these are not tobacco cigarettes,
is that these kids are getting addicted. Addiction is concerning
(18:51):
in and of itself, but we also know that kids
who use the cigarettes are more likely to go on
to use regular cigarettes. And here's where addiction and youth
are an especially worrisome combination. Because their brains are still developing,
it's easier for teens to get hooked, and using nicotine
(19:11):
at a young age can even rewire your brain, making
it easier to become addicted to other drugs. How does
nicotine addiction lead to other addictions? Is that something to
do with your brain and how it impacts the reward
system or dopamine. So nicotine does work on the dopamine pathways,
(19:33):
and dopamine is the reward pathway, and so that's probably
what it is. How it directly primes the brain for
other addictions. I don't know if it's really understood at
a very very molecular level, but we know that it happens,
and I find it interesting. People have asked me, why
is this that kids who use e cigarettes, now we
know this one really a lot of good studies, are
(19:55):
are four times more likely to go on to smoke.
And kids don't like smoking. We finally got rid of that.
You know, we were at an all time low for
kids actually smoking in this country until these cigarettes came along.
And now it looks like it's starting to move them
back towards that. And I'm not sure why, whether it
is the addiction, and why they would go from one
to the other, but we know that it's happening, and
I think that's a concern. The numbers among high school
(20:18):
students are really staggering, aren't they. It's crazy. Tell me
about the numbers. So from two thousand seventeen to two
thousand eighteen, there was a seventy eight percent increase in
the use of these cigarettes by high school students. We
have an uphill battle, I think, because one of the
problems is it took us decades to get a handle
(20:38):
on cigarettes, and I kind of look forward. I'm generally
a very optimistic person and I'm hopeful, but I also
see that the train is out of the station. And
one of the problems we have now is we have
a generation of kids who are addicted and we don't
know how to help them. As a pediatrician, we don't
have any evidence based methods to help them quit at
this point, and so we need to look at that too,
(21:00):
And so we're kind of chasing after this problem from
so many angles. I hope we can get a handle
on it, but I don't want to wait thirty years
to find out the long term effects. Thanks so much.
Up next, a desperate mom and a determined educator confront
the vaping epidemic. Right now, what we're seeing is really
(21:20):
the staff struggling on what to say and how to
say it, and when to do the education with their students.
Kathy Butler Wit is a tobacco treatment specialist who's been
working with the New Jersey Department of Health to try
to get a handle on the vaping crisis as it
continues to unfold. They themselves don't know what these products
are all about, how are they created, what levels of
(21:43):
nicotine are in them? What is a closed pod system?
What is an a juice? And so our team comes
into the schools and we start with administration. We talked
to them about policies, We talked to them about including
education in their curriculum, and then we give of them
the curriculum to use in their schools. So what kind
(22:05):
of kids are vaping? You know? When I was in
high school, even though I did get suspended for smoking
in the bathroom once and had to take a smoking
seminar and got kicked off the cheerleading squad. But that's
a whole another podcast, actually, Kathy, but what kinds of
kids are doing this? I think most people who smoked
regularly who went to my high school would be considered troublemakers.
(22:28):
What about vaping? Does the same profile apply? Absolutely not.
We are finding when we go into these schools that
we have students that are very educated, are health driven,
our sports players, and it's about just this social aspect
of the product, and jewel in particular, which is we
(22:50):
know the highest one that's being used right has the market,
and these students are seeing their peers use them, and
they look at social media and they see advertising that
makes it very sexy and appealing and all appear to
be very very safe. Nothing's going to happen. It's just water.
(23:12):
And as they use them, they are become addicted to
this nicotine. And so going back to thinking about who's
using it, you know, again, we have first of all,
very young kids as young as fifth grade. Now we're
seeing their story as youngest fifth grade is starting to
use these products. At the very least I've heard about
these products, seeing peers use them in bathrooms and on
(23:34):
the school buses and sometimes even in the classrooms. Well,
are they allowed all those places that they know? They
do sneak them. And it's easy to sneak because the
pod system the jewel doesn't create that very large vapor
appearance that we see from other other products. Is that
why so many parents are clueless about this? Absolutely? And
(23:55):
I think we have two avenues with parents. We have
parents who really absolutely no idea that their kids are
using them, But then we have parents who actually know
their kids are using them. Like Lorie, who stumbled upon
and then tried to rationalize her daughter's vaping habit. That
was in her room cleaning, and I found these colorful
(24:17):
little plastic things that I actually thought were the end
of a pencil holder, the lead pencils, And I thought
it was perplexing because I don't remember buying them. So
I took them downstairs and I showed them to her.
I'm like, what is all this? She's like, um, from vaping,
and I'm like, vaping? What is vaping? I didn't even
(24:37):
know what it was. In a weird way, she had
to educate me on this horrible thing because I knew
what cigarettes were, and I guess I knew what a
cigarettes were, but I didn't know what vaping was. This
was two years ago, it was, And initially you were
actually relieved that she was vaping because you were a
smoker in high school and you thought, well, better that
(24:59):
then smoking. Right from what I knew, these cigarettes were
created to help smokers quit, so it wasn't as dangerous
to your health as cigarette smoking. So I remember being
sixteen and at a party and somebody handed me a cigarette.
So I thought it was in some ways natural, this
was going to happen. This is experimenting, This is a
(25:20):
little peer pressure, and I thought it would be safer.
So at first you thought, no big deal. You might
have been slightly bothered by it, but you didn't think
it was going to be a huge issue. No. I
thought it would be the part of learning how to
become an adult. And this is one of those things
that happened in high school that you experimented with and
(25:43):
you cast away. I was not initially concerned. Initially, Then
you realize that this could be a problem, so you
started putting restrictions on your daughter's vaping. Yes, so again
I saw these pods, and I at that point, at sixteen,
I cleaned her room. So I kept seeing more and yes,
(26:05):
well that stopped. I started seeing more and more of them,
and I thought, well, this is not she owns them,
This is not her being at a party. This something's
weird here, something's wrong. So we put rules around it.
She said, I do this at parties. I don't go
to a lot of parties. It's no big deal. It's
not as bad for your health as smoking was. We
(26:26):
all know smoking is terrible for you. This is not
so bad. And again I bought into that. But when
I saw a few more pods that she owned, my
husband and I decided to restrict it, which was I
took what is now I know is a jewel. I
took the instrument away from her, and we said she
(26:46):
could have it on the weekends, so that I felt
like I was monitoring her usage. How did that work out?
So we had the rule that come Friday after school,
when all her home work was done and all her
school activities were done, she was allowed to have it
from Friday to Sunday morning, thinking that again, how much
(27:09):
could she actually intake in a day and a half,
less than forty eight hours, And it turns out they
can intake a lot in that very short time frame,
So she was puffing away on the weekends. Correct, And
did she then say I need to vape more than
forty eight hours a week. We never had that conversation,
(27:31):
and I never saw her actually do any of the intaking. Again,
I found more pods, and I thought it was curious, like,
if I have her instrument of vaping, why are all
these pods here? Because she was borrowing them. And what
I realized in this vaping community is that it is
a community, So whoever has the instrument the jewel shares it,
(27:56):
so it's not like everyone owns one is passed around,
and it is something that they do activity wise together,
so that pen is part of their socialization. And all
these pods meant that they were doing it all the time.
So it didn't matter that she didn't actually have the
(28:18):
device as long as she was supplying some of the
fuel or the pods. Correct, she you know, it was
all's fair? Correct? So when did you realize this was
a problem? So then the media started to catch on
and I started reading articles and I really started to
get concerned. Concerned. That accelerated this fall as news of
(28:39):
vaping related illnesses began to spread and her daughter left
for college, still vaping to this day. My daughter does
not buy it. She does not believe it is as
bad for you as all the hype says. Even now,
even given the cover stories, even given all the reports
(29:00):
and the media, the c d C taking the flavors
off the market, all these developments, and she's still isn't
convinced that it's not good for her. So we're going
to have this conversation. It's interesting. She just turned eighteen
last week, and when we had our phone call with her,
our weekly check in, she said, would you and Grandma
stop sending me all the articles. I'm gonna quit. I'm
(29:22):
gonna quit. What is your overriding emotion right now about
this whole thing. I'm scared. I'm scared for her, I'm
scared for all the kids. Because with cigarettes it was
harder to hide, right, you could smell it, you could
see it. Vaping is undercover, so parents who typically regulate
(29:42):
that can't see it. They can't see when their child
is participating, and we have to. Laurie's far from alone
and feeling frustrated and afraid, and her daughter is far
from alone and her struggles to quit. So where do
we go from here to a top addiction expert who
has some answers. That's next on next question. Hi, Hi,
(30:11):
Dr Avery, so nice to meet you. Thanks so much
for doing this. I decided to make an appointment with
Dr Jonathan Avery. He's the director of Addiction Psychiatry at
the Wild Cornell Medical Center here in New York. In
other words, he knows what he's talking about when it
comes to addiction and nicotine, and he has a very
pragmatic approach to tackling the vaping epidemic. The whole issue
(30:35):
completely exploded this fall. Not to point fingers, Dr Avery,
but where the hell we're all the health professionals while
this was becoming an epidemic. It turns out we're not
much different than anyone else. And I think we were
may be seduced a little bit too about this idea
of having a safer product potentially than than cigarettes. But
I think those on the addiction side were like, you know,
(30:55):
we feel like we're doctors in the nineteen fifties when
they were smoking with patients themselves and their white in
their white jackets stuff in a way, and actually even
featured in commercials, right, And so we had a feeling
from the beginning, Hey, this is going to turn out
similar where the that is going to come out, and
it's not going to be positive. I mean, there's no
way it's going to come out positive. At a minimum,
it's going to be all negative. And so that's sort
(31:17):
of what happened. The numbers of kids using are are
just outrageous. Sometimes some high schools tell me that half
or more are using it around New York City, and
seriously half. And it just became such a part of culture,
and um, what we learned if you ask these same
kids a year ago, is this harmful? They would say no.
A lot didn't know nicotine was in it. They just
sort of knew it was like this flavor, new product
(31:39):
that might be fun. And so everyone was sharing it,
using it, you know, became a part of um schools
and everything else, and so it's sort of everywhere, and
parents weren't the wiser. That's where you come in, Dr
Avery as a psychiatrist, heer who's a specialist in addiction.
You know, you're our man, So what should parents do?
(31:59):
Why always commend checking your own pulse first before going
into a conversation with kids. You know, I think where
it goes wrong is when you come in hot and
you know you're you're both sort of upset, and you
know when you've got them in that I got you moment.
And what I'm encouraging parents to do really around all
substance used behaviors is to have the conversation early and
often in a non judgmental way, and so to get
(32:22):
to the bottom of what they know about the product,
why they think the kids are using or not. And really,
I mean some recommend as early as nine starting the conversation,
some a little later. And while that talk might not
be easy, Dr Avery says it could uncover factors that
might be driving kids to vape in the first place.
I think it's just being there from the beginning with
your kid, letting them know that how they are as
(32:43):
a person, substance use, mental health issues are important to
you as a parent. I'll say it's true for everyone.
But if it's true, you know, more important than all
this academic stuff and all these other pressures and completing
your piano homework or whatever it is, that it really
is their development as a person. And this includes checking
in on what's going on in terms of substance use
and so you're not going to solve it all in
(33:05):
one interaction, and you're not gonna, you know, have the
magic words at any moment, but just sort of saying
this is important to me. We're gonna keep talking about it.
Let's pay attention to what's happening with the news with
jewel or these electronic nicote delivery systems, and let's just
have this conversation together. And if you're not ready now,
I'm ready tomorrow and and we're there in this together.
(33:25):
I can see why some parents are panicked. You know,
you're reading about popcorn lung you're reading about reduced lung capacity.
I mean, I would be freaked out as a mom
if I knew that one of my kids are both
my kids or whatever, that they were doing this enough
to really damage their health. And to be like, we're
ready to talk about it whenever you are. I'm sorry.
(33:45):
In my house, that dog would not hunt. I think
that's true for you know though, it's it's tough because
you want kids to have the information. You don't want
to get in trouble, but you don't want to push
these behaviors into the secrets. And my worry about people
that come down too strong is that the kids go
the opposite direction, and then you're playing catch up years later. Um.
(34:06):
So I'm arguing this more almost as prevention. If things
do get really bad, then certainly intervening and getting them
to help. And and while they're still eighteen, you can
sort of do more things against the world than after
their eighteen um. And so if it looks like they're
you know, they need, then urgent intervention and then certainly
do it. But for most kids, there's this space where
you're preventing it or they're experimenting, where you can start
(34:28):
the conversation. If you're starting the conversation after they're you know,
in trouble, then then everyone's in trouble in that that system.
I feel like the student body needs to get involved
because so much is pure pressure, right, and so much
of this activity is going on at school or at
school functions or outside school functions. So it seems to
(34:49):
me there has to be a really holistic approach to
this issue, right. And I think as kids are hearing
this news, there is sort of this surge in the
other direction of people posting on social media they have
quit and that they are motivated to stop using and
and I've I've heard because when I asked the question
our friends quitting and a year ago, no one knew
anyone who had stopped. But now it's increasingly common that people,
(35:10):
I mean one thing about it. Also in substance use,
as perceived harm goes up, use goes down. Kids don't
want to get hurt. Actually they don't want bad things
to happen to them. And you know, as they see
their peer group and the momentum shifting in the other direction,
I think more will quit. I think why smoking was
smoking sort of you know, it came on over a
number of years, slowly dissipated. And this is one instance
(35:32):
where I think social media and the sort of fast
NewSpace that we have today can be helpful because we're
getting all this information fast in real time. The CDC
updates that reports every Thursday. It's sort of a just
a different way that information is getting out there that
I think we can all digest and modify behaviors quicker,
hopefully than what took decades with cigarettes. They started doing
(35:52):
p S a S. And there are a lot of organizations,
parent groups I know on Facebook who really cared deeply
about this issue and making sure that kids are not
harming themselves. But why is it so hard to kick
this habit? Or is it really hard? Well, I think
one of the things that has lost in the hysteria
of all this is that most people will quit on
their own, and so most people haven't been using in
(36:15):
a way that where they'll get stuck and they'll be
able to say either from that semi successful intervention I
just had with you talking to your parent, or with
you know, just sort of the pure environment, they'll be
able to, um, say hey, I don't want this for myself,
and they'll actually be able to stop. And one thing
I've noticed over the last couple of months is I've
gone into different high schools. There's a bunch of people
that have stopped on their own, never needed to see
(36:35):
me as an addiction provider or even their pediatrician, and
we're able to just stop. And so I think that's
the good news. So what advice would you give kids
like that who are really struggling to kick the habit. Yeah,
if they've tried and they can't, and um, I think
the first thing to do is make people aware. Um,
that's my advice for kids. Addiction hides in the secrets,
if you can be honest and forthcoming about it, you know,
(36:58):
talk to your parents and pediatrician, you know, I think
help will be there. And you know, not every family
is able to do it. Not every pediatrician sort of
aware about this, but I think most are and most
want to help regardless, and so if they can just
get that secret out, get into the hands of a pediatrician,
they can help assess if you I need to refer
you to a psychiatrist to help with or therapist to
(37:18):
help with the anxiety depression. That's a big step. Though.
What about school nurses, They're they're so available. I think
about the school nurse and my daughter's high school that
that was just wonderful and was really a part of
the school community. I feel like they could be really
effective without reach. Now I think that's right. I think
(37:39):
they're the ones that are the front line, and and
that's why pediatrician sometimes of the front line to they're
the ones that should be asking about it, you know,
offering support. School counselors another good resource for people struggling
with different things. And then I think where you might
need medical attention and not all nurses can do it
is if you really need sort of like nicotine replacement
to come off it. If you need the patch or
the gum to sort of soothe that difficult with those cravings. Well,
(38:02):
I was going to ask you, do you recommend the
patch or nicotine gum. It's a little bit of a
difficult space because it's not f D approved under eighteen
um UM, and there is a way carefully. Often you
need parents intervention to help buy it or get permission
for the prescription um. But there is We are for
those folks that are stuck doing sort of a brief
course of of nicotine replacement, the patch or the gum,
(38:25):
which we definitely prefer than people going to cigarettes or
other measures. As they become concerned about these devices, you know,
better not go to cigarettes again, Better to you know,
get tapered off of nicotine if you really need it.
Is it better to withdraw gradually or should you go
cold turkey? It's different for everyone. Some people can tolerate it,
and often those without co occurring mental illness anxiety, and
(38:48):
those you know, without the predisposition for addiction. You know
a bunch of kids I've met have said, you know,
I just decided to stop one day and it was
miserable for a couple of days, but I wrote it out.
And then there is that subset that says, this withdrawal
was the worst thing I've ever experienced in my entire life.
And for those folks, they really need help with a
patch more gradually, and stopping all at once will feel
(39:10):
intolerable to them. How long does it take? Generally it
takes seventy two hours to get nicotine out of your system,
correct as everyone knows who's you're in screen for it
or who every parent is is jumping on them. Yeah,
you know it can be out that short of time,
but we've come to appreciate that withdrawal from all substances
can be a much longer process. And you know, we're
increasingly talking about sort of post acute withdrawal symptoms, which
(39:32):
you know are those anxiety symptoms, the inability to concentrate
and focus, feeling sort of like you've been you know,
punched in the stomach and don't have the energy and
breath to to go about your life. And and so
those things sometimes become the harder barrier as all these
other pressures from life bear down on these kids, right,
I mean, they have to go to soccer practice and
piano lessons and still want to interact with their friends
(39:54):
and do well academically. There's so much academic pressure on
these kids, so not to mention social media and all
the social pressure that comes with that and living your
life compared to other people, your peers. So I feel
bad for kids today with all the comparisons, with all
the pressures, and going back to how parents should talk
(40:15):
to kids, I mean, we over focus on academics, on
doing you know, hitting those marks socially and and and academically,
and we really need to be telling our kids it's
okay to be them no matter what happens in life.
Getting back to vaping, there are some real world consequences,
physical consequences to this habit. How lunch should you be
(40:37):
when you're talking to your kids about things like popcorn
lung and decreased lung capacity and things like that. I mean,
I think you have to be pretty honest, right, Yeah.
They need to know the information, and you know, it's
and I think a lot of them get it. I mean,
kids get info pretty quick these days, and they're hearing
it at school and so in an ideal parent kid
(40:59):
relations ship, they're giving you the information, and you're not
giving them the information. So I always recommend checking first
to see what the kids know, and often they know
a lot. You do have to really check yourself first,
and if you say mindful parenting, people really realize at you.
But there is something about that that I think is
important that you You can't, you know, look at your
kids behaviors without first looking at your thoughts and feelings
(41:20):
and also your own substance use. I have to add,
you know, there are parents who you know, want in
all kinds of ways. They've set the model for their kids. Right.
They're the ones taking the drink or two when they
come home and saying, I'm so stressed, get me a
beer to the kid or whatever. They're the ones that
are jeweling and vaping some themselves, including you know, vaping
marijuana product that's smoking cigarettes or smoking cigarettes, and so
(41:42):
you know, I think often we ask things of our
kids we don't ourselves, and and you really have to
look internally as a parent before you're you're going to
help them, I think. But it's hard, and you'll fail
all the time. And to be a parent is to fail, right,
and and the idea is to just get back on
the horse and and think about what was going on
with you at that moment and try to get things
that going in a positive direction. Again, what's the biggest
(42:04):
mistake parents make when they're trying to get their kids
to stop to view it as a bad kid doing
bad things? And I think the biggest mistake is not
sort of appreciating that this does veer into a disease
model of addiction and and kids are self medicating psychiatric
issues or they're predisposed to addiction, and that you know
a lot of people will experiment and not get hooked
the way their kid is and and not behave the
(42:25):
way their kid is. And there's a reason why it's happening.
And and often it's the sort of idea that it's
activated these reward pathways or satisfying this psychiatric need where
it becomes the answer to all questions for the kid
during the day, how they're going to survive, how they're
going to starve off withdrawal, and it's sort of hijacked
their brain. And one saying in recovery that I love
especially and and and people who when they stop jeweling
(42:47):
or stop using whatever product often identify with is that
I'm not a bad person becoming good, but I'm a
sick person becoming well. And I think that's one of
the key points that these aren't just troublemakers, that these
are kids who have had brain hijacked by this you know,
seductive product, and now we're trying to you know, feel
right and get the ship on track. Wow. I cannot
(43:11):
believe how much has changed between August when we first
started researching this episode and today, now that we're finally
airing it. You could barely keep up with all the developments.
It's still shocking to me that all of us, from
the medical community to educators, to parents and even kids
were caught so off guard and why there was definitely
(43:33):
a lot of smoke and mirrors when it came to
marketing babes as cool, glamorous, even safe, the same way incidentally,
cigarettes once were. The advertising was almost as stealthy as
the vapes themselves. But now this epidemic is out in
the open, and everyone from local officials to schools to
(43:53):
even the Trump administration is trying to figure out what
to do about it, from banning flavors to out lawe
the devices altogether. We haven't heard the end of this
story that at least now we're paying attention. Thanks so
much for listening, everyone, and until we meet again, make
(44:14):
sure to follow me on Instagram. I'm at Katie Curik
and sign up for my daily newsletter is called wake
Up Call, and you can do that by going to
Katie Currek dot com. Next Question with Katie Curic is
a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media.
The executive producers are Katie Kuric, Lauren Bright Pacheco, Julie Douglas,
(44:35):
and Tyler Klang. Our show producers are Bethan Macaluso and
Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. Associate producers
are Emily Pinto and Derek Clemens. Editing is by Dylan Fagin,
Derrek Clements, and Lowell Berlante. Our researcher is Barbara Keene.
For more information on today's episode, go to Katie Currek
dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at
(44:57):
Katie Couric m. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Next Question with Katie Kuric is a production of I
Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curic,
and welcome to Next Question, where we try to understand
the complicated world we're living in and the crazy things
that are happening by asking questions and by listening to
people who really know what they're talking about. At times,
it may lead to some pretty uncomfortable conversations, but stick
(00:24):
with me, everyone, let's all learn together. Whether you call
it Julian vaping or using East cigarettes. By the time
we even realized it was happening, it was already an epidemic.
But we're going to begin with America's vaping crisis. The
alarming update today from the CDC vaping related illnesses and
(00:47):
deaths continue to climb across the US. He sees updating
on the numbers of the lung illnesses associated with vaping.
They are now up to and twenty six deaths across
twenty one states. Now. That's up from about one eighty
last week and eighteen deaths. So this continues to grow
and it continues to impact middle and high school kids
(01:08):
across the country. I'm sixteen years old. I've been dueling
during class and jeweled pretty much every moment where I
wasn't in class For those who have missed the onslaught
of headlines. Jewels, babes, or e cigarettes are small, battery
powered handheld devices used to inhale aerosol produced by heating
(01:32):
a pod full of liquid that often contains nicotine flavorings
and other chemicals. Tobacco companies have been developing them since
the mid sixties, but they didn't hit the market until
two thousand seven and didn't really become widely used until
just a few years ago. Initially, they were marketed as
a way to help adults quit smoking, but their hip
(01:54):
advertising and candy like flavors like bubble Gum, mango and
grape entice a lot of kids. The FDA is holding
a hearing this morning to address the alarming spike in
teen vaping. Most East Sig brands contain nicotine salts, which
exit the blood string quickly, triggering cravings, and that means
(02:15):
they're highly addictive. Jewel, the most popular in the category,
accounted for just two percent of the market in two
thousand sixteen. Three years later, the company captured nearly seventy
of the market, with its sexy, sleek and discreet design,
jewel quickly became the iPhone of e Siggs. I'm fourteen
(02:36):
years old and I'm used the jewel. I'm fifteen years
old and I am a jewel user. I'm fourteen and
I've been using a jewel for nine months. Because babes
were marketed as less dangerous than cigarettes, many young users
didn't even realize they contain nicotine until they were already hooked.
All of my friends, like all my best friends are
(02:58):
like addicted to It's just a part of my life
now that like, I know it's bad, but I can't stop.
The number of people smoking cigarettes has reached record lows,
but now we have a new generation of nicotine addicts.
So how did this happen? That's my next question, and
perhaps more importantly, what can we do about it? The
(03:20):
first thing I observed was that whenever I go to
the bathroom in the stalls, there would be these plastic squares,
and at the beginning I didn't really know what it was,
and then I realized that it was the cartridges from
the Jewel. Two years ago, Jack Waxman, then a junior
at spar Sale High School outside New York City watched
the vaping epidemic unfold firsthand. It was January, and what
(03:42):
I noticed was that kind of over the ensuing months,
the number of kids that were in the bathroom jeweling
and the amount of jewel pods left kind of continued
to increase, and it felt like jewel was kind of
spreading like wildfire amongst my friends and amongst the entire school,
And like so many at the time, he didn't know
what to make of this new trend. It was something
(04:02):
that I hadn't really experienced before. When I was a
freshman of sophomore, bathrooms and schools were places of education
and if any kids were going to be doing drugs,
it would be on the weekend. But I think what
the jewel did is it took kids and kind of
flipped their life backwards and forwards. It's really a twenty
four hour, seven day a week addiction in a way
that many other drugs aren't. And what they did is
(04:23):
it took bathrooms and classrooms and turned them into places
to basically just hit the jewel and fulfill your nicotine addiction.
You made a p s a called Jewelers against Jewel
that went viral and you haven't stopped. You're now a
sophomore at Cornell and the founder of Students Against Nicotine.
How did this problem get so big so fast? And
(04:45):
do agree that it's an epidemic? Yes, So we called
an epidemic in the video last May, and the Surgeon
General called it an epidemic last November. This is what
it is as an epidemic. UM rates went from ten
percent in one year of youth that vape. And that's
the large a single year increase of a drug and
recorded history. And that's not just where I'm from, It's
in every single school because nicotine doesn't discriminate UM and
(05:07):
every single school, every single state, they're experiencing it, just
like where I'm from. What motivated you to shoot this
p s A in the first place. After my junior year,
in my summertime, I was an intern for Chuck Schumer
in the city, and as an intern, I got to
write a policy paper, and a lot of my friends
chose to write about gun control, climate change, very noble issues,
but I just decided to write mine about the jewel
(05:29):
because it was something that I had seen a bit
during my spring year and what I found it was crazy.
I I found that in two thousand nine, Congress band
flavored cigarettes and put all these regulations on cigarettes as
part of the Tobacco Act, but all this stuff was exempted.
These cigarettes were exempted from this regulation. And I also
researched nicotine and found that nicotine, the same thing that
was in cigarettes in the twentieth centuries now in eat
(05:50):
cigarettes in the twenty first century. And I presented my
findings to Senator Schumer and he was so blown away
that he invited me up to do a press conference
with him. He encouraged me, and the whole staff encouraged
me to continue with it. So I had the idea
to make this video and basically recruited some of my
best friends who were struggling with this, and they opened
up and they were so courageous to tell their stories.
And what's happening now is parents understand the problem, and
(06:13):
the younger kids when they're watching his video and classrooms
and other places, they're hearing the stories of these older kids,
and they're basically saying, these older kids regret that they
started jeweling. This is not a cool thing. It's just
a flash drive. It's a loving finger, and this is
not something I want to be doing. Cigarettes are so
stigmatized right now in our country, kids would never pick
up a cigarette. But we're starting to do right now
(06:33):
is we're starting to stigmatize these cigarettes in the same
way that cigarettes are today. When Jack and I sat
down for this interview, it was at the end of August,
and the news linking vaping to a variety of health issues,
even deaths hadn't broken. Many parents and young vapors were
unaware of the dangers. I spoke to one person who
(06:54):
said that their friends were buying jewel for their kids
because they thought that the jewel is a safe alternative
to cigarettes, And now we know that's completely ludicrous. But
I think what we have to do is just continue
to educate parents about what's actually going on and that
these products not only have these crazy, you know, long
term consequences that researchers are looking at right now, but
they rewire the prefrontal cortex in ways that drugs like
(07:16):
cocaine and cigarettes do. It's not a harmless thing. When
I think parents are starting to seething at now, and
for a lot of kids, unfortunately it's too late, but
for millions of other kids, this is a perfect time to,
you know, get these prevention mechanisms out of education and
then also trying to get kids to think about what
they could be doing instead. That was easier said than done.
They didn't continue vaping just to be cool. They were addicted.
(07:40):
Let me ask you about some of the kids, your
friends who you featured in the video. Were they able
to get help? Are they still struggling? So four friends
in my video are still vaping um and it's not
like they didn't try to quit. I want to say,
like I'm surprised, but I'm not right because it's Nicotine
is one of the us addictive drugs in the world,
(08:01):
and that's the reason why they made the video, because
we know how insidious nicotine is, and anyone that smoked
in the past cigarettes or has friends that smoke cigarettes,
it's the same thing. Jack knew early what everyone else
would soon find out. Jewel was in the hot seat.
Within months of this interview, their CEO, Kevin Burns, would
be replaced by an executive from tobacco giant Altria. The
(08:24):
CEO of Jewel apologized in essence. Recently, I guess to
a family who had a child who was addicted, what
did you make of that apology. It's not gonna do anything, right,
I don't know what to say. You thought the words
were hollow. It doesn't do anything for the three million
kids that I've already got addicted to the practs. It
(08:45):
doesn't do anything for the parents, doesn't do anything for us. Besides,
you create noise that won't move the issue forward at all.
And it's just that's really all you can say about it.
It's not even a story. Three million kids are addicted. Mhm.
Where did you get that number? C D, C F
D A, all these you know, public health agencies, they
(09:06):
run these studies and those are the numbers that are
out there today. In addition to the flavors, manufacturers seemed
to be pretty effective at social media. How big an
impact has that had? In sixteen, that's when Jewels social
media was kind of insane. They were featuring like twenty
year old models with you know, cool photos, And there
(09:29):
was this crazy study done by the Stanford about how
Jewels marketing in those two years compared to Marlborough and
other big tobacco companies, and it was practically identical. So
Jewel basically spent millions of dollars putting these it's it
was the vaporized advertisement. It was all over Time Square
of these you know, hit models with all these crazy colors,
(09:50):
and they used social media to get kids interested in
the products. You can't be doing that. That's just not okay. Well,
thank you so much, Jack, Thank you so much for
having me on. Jack wasn't the only one sounding the alarm. Next,
we'll talk with one of the first journalists to report
on the teenage babing epidemic, as well as the doctor
(10:13):
who blew the whistle on the hidden nicotine levels of
the cigarettes. This was just one of those stories that
it felt like everywhere I turned and everyone I talked to,
they were talking about this. They were worried about their kids,
or they were kids, you know, children are friends of
mine who were talking about this. Last year, New York
Times reporter Kate Cernaki wrote a bunch of articles that
covered the vaping crisis in high schools and middle schools
(10:36):
across the country, and what she uncovered shocked her as
much as her readers. It was really one of those
things that you found at every socio economic level. Geographically,
it was everywhere California, Rhode Island, Florida. I mean, it
was just any when you talked to agreed that this
was a problem. So it was happening almost in every state.
This is happening in Middle America, and not just on
(10:57):
the coast, not just urban centers. Absolutely, it was everywhere,
and it was girls and boys, which I think surprised
school administrators as well. What was shocking about it to
me was that it had come up on them so quickly.
It really was. These things had appeared in the fall,
and I guess it was and suddenly by spring it
was just everywhere, and the schools did not know what
to do. They were completely unprepared. I think that for
(11:19):
a lot of kids, you know, we've raised them to
understand that drinking and driving is bad, and cigarettes are
bad and they're ugly, but vaping, but jewel in particular,
came across as kind of a clean thing to do,
you know. It wasn't messy like cigarettes. Almost invariably the
schools I talked to would say, you know, a kid
comes into my office and says, you know, I've caught
someone jeweling, and I said, would you smoke a cigarette?
(11:39):
The kid would be horrified at the idea of smoking
a cigarette, but vaping somehow seemed cleaner to them. It
didn't seem addictive, it didn't seem like an ugly thing
to do or something that was going to make your
teeth look bad or make you smell bad. And a
lot of kids, when I spoke to them, they would
have arguments with me about oh no, there's no there's
no nicotine and jewel. So I think there was a
lot of misunderstanding about what exactly it was. You opened
(12:01):
your first story with a boy from Cape Elizabeth, Maine
confiding in his vice principle tell us a little bit
about that conversation. So this was a student who had
been caught vaping. I think not once, maybe not even twice,
but maybe a third time. I can't remember, but it
was several times. And so the principle was saying, you know, what,
what is it like? You want to, you know, you
want to understand a teenager why they're misbehaving. And the
(12:23):
kid kids said, I can't stop. That was his line,
I can't stop. And this was really what was alarming schools.
This must be so disruptive, Kate, when it comes to
teaching and learning with kids not being able to concentrate.
You know, I know that they're calling bathrooms jeweling lounges
with toilets. I mean, how how much of a problem
(12:44):
is this creating in terms of actually doing the job
schools are supposed to be doing. It's been really huge.
I mean, in California, I talked to one high school
that had to close two bathrooms so that no more
than one student could go into the bathroom at a
time because they were going to share jewels. You know.
One thing that was interesting to me was that schools
felt like this had become such a disruption that they
were actually now treating it not as a disciplinary problem,
(13:06):
but is the medical problem right where they needed to intervene.
And so one of the schools in Colorado that I
spoke to said that there was a young woman who
came in and they gave her a treatment plan to
try to kick the jewel and part of her treatment
plan was standing in the back of the classroom shaking
her foot because it was she just needed to get
that anxious energy out. So I think schools are really
struggling to figure out is this a disciplinary problem. Is
(13:27):
it a disciplinary problem where they need to expel kids
or suspend kids, or is this primarily a health issue
and do they just need to get these kids some
kind of treatment. What needs to happen in your view, Well,
I do think you know, look, I think we need
to understand that this generation, as I said, has been told,
there are so many things they can't do. You know,
we've raised them in such a bubble. In many ways,
you've tried to preserve their perfect health, and so I
(13:49):
think we need to give them some education around vaping
and around nicotine in particular. I think we were very
good at saying that cigarettes cause cancer, and it was
the tar and the cigarettes, right, it was the smoke,
it was all those chemicals. They didn't understand that nicotine
was also bad for you, and in this case, it's
getting them hooked. We also don't know all the chemicals
that are in vaping devices, So I think really education
(14:11):
is a huge part. I think a lot of kids,
in particular, if they understood the chemicals that are in
these devices, they would look at this and think, I
wouldn't you know, I want that in my sunscreen, much
less in my lungs. What kind of chemicals are in
these besides nicotine? Well, there's uh, some studies have found propylene, glycol,
glycerol um. There's one chemical called I think it's a
(14:32):
dia setal. I'm not sure how you say it, but
it's It creates popcorn lung, which has been really obviously
very dangerous and scary. But the thing that struck me
there was a there was an article in the journal
Pediatrics I believe it was in March of seen and
it found elevated levels of five carcinogenic compounds in the
urine of students who vaped. We've done so much research
on tobacco and on cigarettes, we know what's in them.
(14:54):
We don't know a lot about vaping devices. We haven't
studied them over the long terms. We don't know what
the long effects are because it's so new. And to
that end, parents are slightly clueless, aren't they. I mean,
I'm I'm clueless. I actually our team went out and
they bought me a vape. It looks a little like
a cross between a big lighter and a thumb drive, right,
(15:15):
I mean, it's really small. It's then this is again
the double edged sword of the jewel, which is that
it's designed so that someone who wants to quit smoking
can take a hit of the jewel and have something
that gives them the same you know, buzz of a cigarette, right,
because it's a huge dose of nicotine. But that same
thing is going to give a kid who's never smoked
before that huge dose of nicotine. So there's the addiction
(15:36):
is going to come faster. They're eighteen cigarettes in that
eighteen cigarettes in a pod. Right. The other in citious
problem with vapy, kids were absolutely clueless about what they
were inhaling. We made a survey, an anonymous survey which
we gave to just over five kids in our clinical
(15:57):
practice over the course of a year, and the survey
was based on other national surveys with standard questions about
their use of tobacco, electronic cigarettes, and marijuana and so forth.
And then we also collected from some of those kids.
We collected urine for what's called biomarker of nicotine, so
it reflects the nicotine that they're getting in their body.
(16:18):
Dr Rachel Boykin is an Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics
at Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, and
she has been doing extensive research on kids and vaping.
We wanted to know if what they were saying was
matched in the urine. But we also wanted to get
a kind of a sense of how much nicotine they
(16:39):
were being exposed to because this kind of study hadn't
been done before. So did you find that some of
the kids on the first question weren't honest or didn't
realize that they were being exposed to nicotine? We found
that in general, kids who used electronic cigarettes were truthful
about what they said. They said they used them, and
we saw the nicotine byproduct than their urine. But did
(17:01):
they appreciate the fact that they were being exposed to
not all of them. So when we asked them, does
your electronic cigarette have nicotine in it? Some of them
said I don't know or know when. In fact, in
their urine we saw that marker of nicotine cotnein, which
said that they actually were exposed to it. So it
didn't mean they were necessarily being dishonest, they just didn't
understand correct. And what did you find in terms of
(17:24):
the level of nicotine that they were getting in their
bodies through the cigarettes? Number one, that they were getting
levels that are comparable, in some cases even higher than
kids who used cigarettes. We also found that kids who
used the e cigarettes more frequently, like every day, higher levels,
which kind of makes sense. We also found that the
(17:46):
kids who were using what we call the ponds like Jewel,
which is the latest generation and the most popular of
them and also has the most nicotine of all the cigarettes,
those kids also had the highest levels, So it kind
of makes sense. But it put some objective data, if
you will, into kind of what we thought was happening.
So you weren't necessarily surprised. Where you concerned when you
(18:09):
saw these levels in these young kids? Absolutely well. Nicotine
is bad for a number of reasons. Nicotine in and
of itself, we know has bad effects on a teenager's brain.
Teenagers brains are not actually developed until about agent It
can have effects on your ability to learn and so
(18:30):
on cognition. It can affect anxiety, caused depression. Just by itself,
nicotine is dangerous, but nicotine is also extremely addictive. It's
the thing that causes people to be addicted to tobacco cigarettes,
and so the concern, although these are not tobacco cigarettes,
is that these kids are getting addicted. Addiction is concerning
(18:51):
in and of itself, but we also know that kids
who use the cigarettes are more likely to go on
to use regular cigarettes. And here's where addiction and youth
are an especially worrisome combination. Because their brains are still developing,
it's easier for teens to get hooked, and using nicotine
(19:11):
at a young age can even rewire your brain, making
it easier to become addicted to other drugs. How does
nicotine addiction lead to other addictions? Is that something to
do with your brain and how it impacts the reward
system or dopamine. So nicotine does work on the dopamine pathways,
(19:33):
and dopamine is the reward pathway, and so that's probably
what it is. How it directly primes the brain for
other addictions. I don't know if it's really understood at
a very very molecular level, but we know that it happens,
and I find it interesting. People have asked me, why
is this that kids who use e cigarettes, now we
know this one really a lot of good studies, are
(19:55):
are four times more likely to go on to smoke.
And kids don't like smoking. We finally got rid of that.
You know, we were at an all time low for
kids actually smoking in this country until these cigarettes came along.
And now it looks like it's starting to move them
back towards that. And I'm not sure why, whether it
is the addiction, and why they would go from one
to the other, but we know that it's happening, and
I think that's a concern. The numbers among high school
(20:18):
students are really staggering, aren't they. It's crazy. Tell me
about the numbers. So from two thousand seventeen to two
thousand eighteen, there was a seventy eight percent increase in
the use of these cigarettes by high school students. We
have an uphill battle, I think, because one of the
problems is it took us decades to get a handle
(20:38):
on cigarettes, and I kind of look forward. I'm generally
a very optimistic person and I'm hopeful, but I also
see that the train is out of the station. And
one of the problems we have now is we have
a generation of kids who are addicted and we don't
know how to help them. As a pediatrician, we don't
have any evidence based methods to help them quit at
this point, and so we need to look at that too,
(21:00):
And so we're kind of chasing after this problem from
so many angles. I hope we can get a handle
on it, but I don't want to wait thirty years
to find out the long term effects. Thanks so much.
Up next, a desperate mom and a determined educator confront
the vaping epidemic. Right now, what we're seeing is really
(21:20):
the staff struggling on what to say and how to
say it, and when to do the education with their students.
Kathy Butler Wit is a tobacco treatment specialist who's been
working with the New Jersey Department of Health to try
to get a handle on the vaping crisis as it
continues to unfold. They themselves don't know what these products
are all about, how are they created, what levels of
(21:43):
nicotine are in them? What is a closed pod system?
What is an a juice? And so our team comes
into the schools and we start with administration. We talked
to them about policies, We talked to them about including
education in their curriculum, and then we give of them
the curriculum to use in their schools. So what kind
(22:05):
of kids are vaping? You know? When I was in
high school, even though I did get suspended for smoking
in the bathroom once and had to take a smoking
seminar and got kicked off the cheerleading squad. But that's
a whole another podcast, actually, Kathy, but what kinds of
kids are doing this? I think most people who smoked
regularly who went to my high school would be considered troublemakers.
(22:28):
What about vaping? Does the same profile apply? Absolutely not.
We are finding when we go into these schools that
we have students that are very educated, are health driven,
our sports players, and it's about just this social aspect
of the product, and jewel in particular, which is we
(22:50):
know the highest one that's being used right has the market,
and these students are seeing their peers use them, and
they look at social media and they see advertising that
makes it very sexy and appealing and all appear to
be very very safe. Nothing's going to happen. It's just water.
(23:12):
And as they use them, they are become addicted to
this nicotine. And so going back to thinking about who's
using it, you know, again, we have first of all,
very young kids as young as fifth grade. Now we're
seeing their story as youngest fifth grade is starting to
use these products. At the very least I've heard about
these products, seeing peers use them in bathrooms and on
(23:34):
the school buses and sometimes even in the classrooms. Well,
are they allowed all those places that they know? They
do sneak them. And it's easy to sneak because the
pod system the jewel doesn't create that very large vapor
appearance that we see from other other products. Is that
why so many parents are clueless about this? Absolutely? And
(23:55):
I think we have two avenues with parents. We have
parents who really absolutely no idea that their kids are
using them, But then we have parents who actually know
their kids are using them. Like Lorie, who stumbled upon
and then tried to rationalize her daughter's vaping habit. That
was in her room cleaning, and I found these colorful
(24:17):
little plastic things that I actually thought were the end
of a pencil holder, the lead pencils, And I thought
it was perplexing because I don't remember buying them. So
I took them downstairs and I showed them to her.
I'm like, what is all this? She's like, um, from vaping,
and I'm like, vaping? What is vaping? I didn't even
(24:37):
know what it was. In a weird way, she had
to educate me on this horrible thing because I knew
what cigarettes were, and I guess I knew what a
cigarettes were, but I didn't know what vaping was. This
was two years ago, it was, And initially you were
actually relieved that she was vaping because you were a
smoker in high school and you thought, well, better that
(24:59):
then smoking. Right from what I knew, these cigarettes were
created to help smokers quit, so it wasn't as dangerous
to your health as cigarette smoking. So I remember being
sixteen and at a party and somebody handed me a cigarette.
So I thought it was in some ways natural, this
was going to happen. This is experimenting, This is a
(25:20):
little peer pressure, and I thought it would be safer.
So at first you thought, no big deal. You might
have been slightly bothered by it, but you didn't think
it was going to be a huge issue. No. I
thought it would be the part of learning how to
become an adult. And this is one of those things
that happened in high school that you experimented with and
(25:43):
you cast away. I was not initially concerned. Initially, Then
you realize that this could be a problem, so you
started putting restrictions on your daughter's vaping. Yes, so again
I saw these pods, and I at that point, at sixteen,
I cleaned her room. So I kept seeing more and yes,
(26:05):
well that stopped. I started seeing more and more of them,
and I thought, well, this is not she owns them,
This is not her being at a party. This something's
weird here, something's wrong. So we put rules around it.
She said, I do this at parties. I don't go
to a lot of parties. It's no big deal. It's
not as bad for your health as smoking was. We
(26:26):
all know smoking is terrible for you. This is not
so bad. And again I bought into that. But when
I saw a few more pods that she owned, my
husband and I decided to restrict it, which was I
took what is now I know is a jewel. I
took the instrument away from her, and we said she
(26:46):
could have it on the weekends, so that I felt
like I was monitoring her usage. How did that work out?
So we had the rule that come Friday after school,
when all her home work was done and all her
school activities were done, she was allowed to have it
from Friday to Sunday morning, thinking that again, how much
(27:09):
could she actually intake in a day and a half,
less than forty eight hours, And it turns out they
can intake a lot in that very short time frame,
So she was puffing away on the weekends. Correct, And
did she then say I need to vape more than
forty eight hours a week. We never had that conversation,
(27:31):
and I never saw her actually do any of the intaking. Again,
I found more pods, and I thought it was curious, like,
if I have her instrument of vaping, why are all
these pods here? Because she was borrowing them. And what
I realized in this vaping community is that it is
a community, So whoever has the instrument the jewel shares it,
(27:56):
so it's not like everyone owns one is passed around,
and it is something that they do activity wise together,
so that pen is part of their socialization. And all
these pods meant that they were doing it all the time.
So it didn't matter that she didn't actually have the
(28:18):
device as long as she was supplying some of the
fuel or the pods. Correct, she you know, it was
all's fair? Correct? So when did you realize this was
a problem? So then the media started to catch on
and I started reading articles and I really started to
get concerned. Concerned. That accelerated this fall as news of
(28:39):
vaping related illnesses began to spread and her daughter left
for college, still vaping to this day. My daughter does
not buy it. She does not believe it is as
bad for you as all the hype says. Even now,
even given the cover stories, even given all the reports
(29:00):
and the media, the c d C taking the flavors
off the market, all these developments, and she's still isn't
convinced that it's not good for her. So we're going
to have this conversation. It's interesting. She just turned eighteen
last week, and when we had our phone call with her,
our weekly check in, she said, would you and Grandma
stop sending me all the articles. I'm gonna quit. I'm
(29:22):
gonna quit. What is your overriding emotion right now about
this whole thing. I'm scared. I'm scared for her, I'm
scared for all the kids. Because with cigarettes it was
harder to hide, right, you could smell it, you could
see it. Vaping is undercover, so parents who typically regulate
(29:42):
that can't see it. They can't see when their child
is participating, and we have to. Laurie's far from alone
and feeling frustrated and afraid, and her daughter is far
from alone and her struggles to quit. So where do
we go from here to a top addiction expert who
has some answers. That's next on next question. Hi, Hi,
(30:11):
Dr Avery, so nice to meet you. Thanks so much
for doing this. I decided to make an appointment with
Dr Jonathan Avery. He's the director of Addiction Psychiatry at
the Wild Cornell Medical Center here in New York. In
other words, he knows what he's talking about when it
comes to addiction and nicotine, and he has a very
pragmatic approach to tackling the vaping epidemic. The whole issue
(30:35):
completely exploded this fall. Not to point fingers, Dr Avery,
but where the hell we're all the health professionals while
this was becoming an epidemic. It turns out we're not
much different than anyone else. And I think we were
may be seduced a little bit too about this idea
of having a safer product potentially than than cigarettes. But
I think those on the addiction side were like, you know,
(30:55):
we feel like we're doctors in the nineteen fifties when
they were smoking with patients themselves and their white in
their white jackets stuff in a way, and actually even
featured in commercials, right, And so we had a feeling
from the beginning, Hey, this is going to turn out
similar where the that is going to come out, and
it's not going to be positive. I mean, there's no
way it's going to come out positive. At a minimum,
it's going to be all negative. And so that's sort
(31:17):
of what happened. The numbers of kids using are are
just outrageous. Sometimes some high schools tell me that half
or more are using it around New York City, and
seriously half. And it just became such a part of culture,
and um, what we learned if you ask these same
kids a year ago, is this harmful? They would say no.
A lot didn't know nicotine was in it. They just
sort of knew it was like this flavor, new product
(31:39):
that might be fun. And so everyone was sharing it,
using it, you know, became a part of um schools
and everything else, and so it's sort of everywhere, and
parents weren't the wiser. That's where you come in, Dr
Avery as a psychiatrist, heer who's a specialist in addiction.
You know, you're our man, So what should parents do?
(31:59):
Why always commend checking your own pulse first before going
into a conversation with kids. You know, I think where
it goes wrong is when you come in hot and
you know you're you're both sort of upset, and you
know when you've got them in that I got you moment.
And what I'm encouraging parents to do really around all
substance used behaviors is to have the conversation early and
often in a non judgmental way, and so to get
(32:22):
to the bottom of what they know about the product,
why they think the kids are using or not. And really,
I mean some recommend as early as nine starting the conversation,
some a little later. And while that talk might not
be easy, Dr Avery says it could uncover factors that
might be driving kids to vape in the first place.
I think it's just being there from the beginning with
your kid, letting them know that how they are as
(32:43):
a person, substance use, mental health issues are important to
you as a parent. I'll say it's true for everyone.
But if it's true, you know, more important than all
this academic stuff and all these other pressures and completing
your piano homework or whatever it is, that it really
is their development as a person. And this includes checking
in on what's going on in terms of substance use
and so you're not going to solve it all in
(33:05):
one interaction, and you're not gonna, you know, have the
magic words at any moment, but just sort of saying
this is important to me. We're gonna keep talking about it.
Let's pay attention to what's happening with the news with
jewel or these electronic nicote delivery systems, and let's just
have this conversation together. And if you're not ready now,
I'm ready tomorrow and and we're there in this together.
(33:25):
I can see why some parents are panicked. You know,
you're reading about popcorn lung you're reading about reduced lung capacity.
I mean, I would be freaked out as a mom
if I knew that one of my kids are both
my kids or whatever, that they were doing this enough
to really damage their health. And to be like, we're
ready to talk about it whenever you are. I'm sorry.
(33:45):
In my house, that dog would not hunt. I think
that's true for you know though, it's it's tough because
you want kids to have the information. You don't want
to get in trouble, but you don't want to push
these behaviors into the secrets. And my worry about people
that come down too strong is that the kids go
the opposite direction, and then you're playing catch up years later. Um.
(34:06):
So I'm arguing this more almost as prevention. If things
do get really bad, then certainly intervening and getting them
to help. And and while they're still eighteen, you can
sort of do more things against the world than after
their eighteen um. And so if it looks like they're
you know, they need, then urgent intervention and then certainly
do it. But for most kids, there's this space where
you're preventing it or they're experimenting, where you can start
(34:28):
the conversation. If you're starting the conversation after they're you know,
in trouble, then then everyone's in trouble in that that system.
I feel like the student body needs to get involved
because so much is pure pressure, right, and so much
of this activity is going on at school or at
school functions or outside school functions. So it seems to
(34:49):
me there has to be a really holistic approach to
this issue, right. And I think as kids are hearing
this news, there is sort of this surge in the
other direction of people posting on social media they have
quit and that they are motivated to stop using and
and I've I've heard because when I asked the question
our friends quitting and a year ago, no one knew
anyone who had stopped. But now it's increasingly common that people,
(35:10):
I mean one thing about it. Also in substance use,
as perceived harm goes up, use goes down. Kids don't
want to get hurt. Actually they don't want bad things
to happen to them. And you know, as they see
their peer group and the momentum shifting in the other direction,
I think more will quit. I think why smoking was
smoking sort of you know, it came on over a
number of years, slowly dissipated. And this is one instance
(35:32):
where I think social media and the sort of fast
NewSpace that we have today can be helpful because we're
getting all this information fast in real time. The CDC
updates that reports every Thursday. It's sort of a just
a different way that information is getting out there that
I think we can all digest and modify behaviors quicker,
hopefully than what took decades with cigarettes. They started doing
(35:52):
p S a S. And there are a lot of organizations,
parent groups I know on Facebook who really cared deeply
about this issue and making sure that kids are not
harming themselves. But why is it so hard to kick
this habit? Or is it really hard? Well, I think
one of the things that has lost in the hysteria
of all this is that most people will quit on
their own, and so most people haven't been using in
(36:15):
a way that where they'll get stuck and they'll be
able to say either from that semi successful intervention I
just had with you talking to your parent, or with
you know, just sort of the pure environment, they'll be
able to, um, say hey, I don't want this for myself,
and they'll actually be able to stop. And one thing
I've noticed over the last couple of months is I've
gone into different high schools. There's a bunch of people
that have stopped on their own, never needed to see
(36:35):
me as an addiction provider or even their pediatrician, and
we're able to just stop. And so I think that's
the good news. So what advice would you give kids
like that who are really struggling to kick the habit. Yeah,
if they've tried and they can't, and um, I think
the first thing to do is make people aware. Um,
that's my advice for kids. Addiction hides in the secrets,
if you can be honest and forthcoming about it, you know,
(36:58):
talk to your parents and pediatrician, you know, I think
help will be there. And you know, not every family
is able to do it. Not every pediatrician sort of
aware about this, but I think most are and most
want to help regardless, and so if they can just
get that secret out, get into the hands of a pediatrician,
they can help assess if you I need to refer
you to a psychiatrist to help with or therapist to
(37:18):
help with the anxiety depression. That's a big step. Though.
What about school nurses, They're they're so available. I think
about the school nurse and my daughter's high school that
that was just wonderful and was really a part of
the school community. I feel like they could be really
effective without reach. Now I think that's right. I think
(37:39):
they're the ones that are the front line, and and
that's why pediatrician sometimes of the front line to they're
the ones that should be asking about it, you know,
offering support. School counselors another good resource for people struggling
with different things. And then I think where you might
need medical attention and not all nurses can do it
is if you really need sort of like nicotine replacement
to come off it. If you need the patch or
the gum to sort of soothe that difficult with those cravings. Well,
(38:02):
I was going to ask you, do you recommend the
patch or nicotine gum. It's a little bit of a
difficult space because it's not f D approved under eighteen
um UM, and there is a way carefully. Often you
need parents intervention to help buy it or get permission
for the prescription um. But there is We are for
those folks that are stuck doing sort of a brief
course of of nicotine replacement, the patch or the gum,
(38:25):
which we definitely prefer than people going to cigarettes or
other measures. As they become concerned about these devices, you know,
better not go to cigarettes again, Better to you know,
get tapered off of nicotine if you really need it.
Is it better to withdraw gradually or should you go
cold turkey? It's different for everyone. Some people can tolerate it,
and often those without co occurring mental illness anxiety, and
(38:48):
those you know, without the predisposition for addiction. You know
a bunch of kids I've met have said, you know,
I just decided to stop one day and it was
miserable for a couple of days, but I wrote it out.
And then there is that subset that says, this withdrawal
was the worst thing I've ever experienced in my entire life.
And for those folks, they really need help with a
patch more gradually, and stopping all at once will feel
(39:10):
intolerable to them. How long does it take? Generally it
takes seventy two hours to get nicotine out of your system,
correct as everyone knows who's you're in screen for it
or who every parent is is jumping on them. Yeah,
you know it can be out that short of time,
but we've come to appreciate that withdrawal from all substances
can be a much longer process. And you know, we're
increasingly talking about sort of post acute withdrawal symptoms, which
(39:32):
you know are those anxiety symptoms, the inability to concentrate
and focus, feeling sort of like you've been you know,
punched in the stomach and don't have the energy and
breath to to go about your life. And and so
those things sometimes become the harder barrier as all these
other pressures from life bear down on these kids, right,
I mean, they have to go to soccer practice and
piano lessons and still want to interact with their friends
(39:54):
and do well academically. There's so much academic pressure on
these kids, so not to mention social media and all
the social pressure that comes with that and living your
life compared to other people, your peers. So I feel
bad for kids today with all the comparisons, with all
the pressures, and going back to how parents should talk
(40:15):
to kids, I mean, we over focus on academics, on
doing you know, hitting those marks socially and and and academically,
and we really need to be telling our kids it's
okay to be them no matter what happens in life.
Getting back to vaping, there are some real world consequences,
physical consequences to this habit. How lunch should you be
(40:37):
when you're talking to your kids about things like popcorn
lung and decreased lung capacity and things like that. I mean,
I think you have to be pretty honest, right, Yeah.
They need to know the information, and you know, it's
and I think a lot of them get it. I mean,
kids get info pretty quick these days, and they're hearing
it at school and so in an ideal parent kid
(40:59):
relations ship, they're giving you the information, and you're not
giving them the information. So I always recommend checking first
to see what the kids know, and often they know
a lot. You do have to really check yourself first,
and if you say mindful parenting, people really realize at you.
But there is something about that that I think is
important that you You can't, you know, look at your
kids behaviors without first looking at your thoughts and feelings
(41:20):
and also your own substance use. I have to add,
you know, there are parents who you know, want in
all kinds of ways. They've set the model for their kids. Right.
They're the ones taking the drink or two when they
come home and saying, I'm so stressed, get me a
beer to the kid or whatever. They're the ones that
are jeweling and vaping some themselves, including you know, vaping
marijuana product that's smoking cigarettes or smoking cigarettes, and so
(41:42):
you know, I think often we ask things of our
kids we don't ourselves, and and you really have to
look internally as a parent before you're you're going to
help them, I think. But it's hard, and you'll fail
all the time. And to be a parent is to fail, right,
and and the idea is to just get back on
the horse and and think about what was going on
with you at that moment and try to get things
that going in a positive direction. Again, what's the biggest
(42:04):
mistake parents make when they're trying to get their kids
to stop to view it as a bad kid doing
bad things? And I think the biggest mistake is not
sort of appreciating that this does veer into a disease
model of addiction and and kids are self medicating psychiatric
issues or they're predisposed to addiction, and that you know
a lot of people will experiment and not get hooked
the way their kid is and and not behave the
(42:25):
way their kid is. And there's a reason why it's happening.
And and often it's the sort of idea that it's
activated these reward pathways or satisfying this psychiatric need where
it becomes the answer to all questions for the kid
during the day, how they're going to survive, how they're
going to starve off withdrawal, and it's sort of hijacked
their brain. And one saying in recovery that I love
especially and and and people who when they stop jeweling
(42:47):
or stop using whatever product often identify with is that
I'm not a bad person becoming good, but I'm a
sick person becoming well. And I think that's one of
the key points that these aren't just troublemakers, that these
are kids who have had brain hijacked by this you know,
seductive product, and now we're trying to you know, feel
right and get the ship on track. Wow. I cannot
(43:11):
believe how much has changed between August when we first
started researching this episode and today, now that we're finally
airing it. You could barely keep up with all the developments.
It's still shocking to me that all of us, from
the medical community to educators, to parents and even kids
were caught so off guard and why there was definitely
(43:33):
a lot of smoke and mirrors when it came to
marketing babes as cool, glamorous, even safe, the same way incidentally,
cigarettes once were. The advertising was almost as stealthy as
the vapes themselves. But now this epidemic is out in
the open, and everyone from local officials to schools to
(43:53):
even the Trump administration is trying to figure out what
to do about it, from banning flavors to out lawe
the devices altogether. We haven't heard the end of this
story that at least now we're paying attention. Thanks so
much for listening, everyone, and until we meet again, make
(44:14):
sure to follow me on Instagram. I'm at Katie Curik
and sign up for my daily newsletter is called wake
Up Call, and you can do that by going to
Katie Currek dot com. Next Question with Katie Curic is
a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media.
The executive producers are Katie Kuric, Lauren Bright Pacheco, Julie Douglas,
(44:35):
and Tyler Klang. Our show producers are Bethan Macaluso and
Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. Associate producers
are Emily Pinto and Derek Clemens. Editing is by Dylan Fagin,
Derrek Clements, and Lowell Berlante. Our researcher is Barbara Keene.
For more information on today's episode, go to Katie Currek
dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at
(44:57):
Katie Couric m. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Katie Couric
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