Things You Learn in Therapy
Things You Learn in Therapy
Ep 109: Exploring Youth Vaping: Practical Strategies for Parents and Educators with Elisa Worland
Discover the critical insights into youth vaping with Elisa Worland from Purdue Extension. Ever wondered how cultural and policy differences between states can impact smoking rates? Elisa, leveraging her extensive background in social work and community practice, shares her unique experiences and observations from both California and Indiana. You won't want to miss her fascinating stories from Vietnam, including her adventurous taste-testing of rice paddy rat, and how these cultural encounters enriched her perspective on public health.
Parents, do you know how to effectively communicate the dangers of vaping to your children? This episode equips you with practical strategies to help your kids navigate peer pressure and make healthier choices. Elisa and I dig deep into the effects of nicotine on developing brains and provide actionable advice for modeling healthy behaviors. By recognizing signs of vaping and fostering open communication, you can play a pivotal role in preventing nicotine addiction in your child's life.
Schools also face significant challenges with the rise of vaping among students. How can educators address this issue without resorting to punitive measures? We discuss the importance of training staff to recognize vaping devices, implementing supportive policies, and the role of educational programs like Catch My Breath. From employing motivational interviewing techniques to understanding youth behavior, this episode offers comprehensive strategies to create a healthier, vape-free environment in schools. Don't miss our heartfelt discussion on collaboration and future episodes, and a big thank you to our listeners!
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www.bethtrammell.com
Hello listener, welcome back. I'm your host, dr Beth Tremell, and I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at Indiana University East, where I also am the Director of the Master's in Mental Health Counseling Program, and I love sharing with folks about things you learn in therapy, and that's what we're going to continue to talk about today, and we're actually talking about a topic that, I'll be real honest, I have not had a lot of experience. It has been kind of a long time since I worked in residential treatment, which is probably where I would have seen this. Most of my experience was in outpatient treatment and I'm sure some of the young people I worked with were vaping and I probably just didn't always know it. So I'm excited that we are going to get to dive into this a little bit today, and my colleague, elisa Worland, is here to talk about this, and so, elisa, can you tell us a little bit about you and one fun thing about you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I'm Elisa Worland and I work for Purdue Extension. I'm the Community Development and Health and Human Sciences Educator and, for those of you who maybe aren't familiar with Extension, we are the community wing of Purdue University. We have offices in all 92 counties and we work in four areas agriculture and natural resources, 4-h, youth development, health and human sciences and community development. And I work at the county level in Wayne County and my background is also in social work. I'm a licensed social worker in the state of Indiana and my program that I went through we had to focus more on community-based practice. So looking more at systems, organizations, coalitions, and how do we work across these different groups to improve service delivery and help people get where they need to be.
Speaker 1:Is that your fun thing?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, fun thing. There's other fun things. Yes, yes, fun thing. I helped out recently with Purdue, had a study abroad trip to Vietnam with some of the students from the agriculture sector and I served as a mentor for the students and we had the opportunity to try rice patty rat at one of our meals, did you?
Speaker 1:say rat like R-A-T.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, which is actually the question I had when we were there. I was like, did you say rat, not cat? And the lady said yes, rat lives in rice patty. And my colleague, when he went up to go try this as well, was like rat and they're like, yes, like Tom and Jerry're like yes, like tom and jerry, just jerry well, actually I think jerry is a mouse, but I understand the.
Speaker 1:The language barrier might have been okay, so how was that?
Speaker 2:elisa, uh it. It tasted kind of similar, I guess, to maybe like a gamey chicken. It did look like someone had flattened out a mammal because it had been grilled. Sorry to anyone who's eating their lunch right now, by the way. So funny.
Speaker 1:What people can't see is both of our facial expressions as we're describing this culinary experience of yours in Vietnam.
Speaker 2:That looks like Beth is not on board with trying that. I am not on board.
Speaker 1:I am actually not the most adventurous eater. I like foods that I like and I'm not really picky. I just think my stomach is a little bit particular about what happens, and so I stick to mostly what I know. And it's not Jerry.
Speaker 2:I will say it was better than sea urchin. I've had that and that looks like something that got in a scuffle with a food processor and the food processor one. So on the scale of things that I would eat again, rat was higher up than some other things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think it would make my list at all. Actually, I'll take a solid chicken breast and, you know, a salad. That'd be just totally fine with me and my stomach. You know, I don't. I also there. I think there are people who like live their lives to like be adventurous from a culinary perspective, and I don't. I just really don't.
Speaker 2:I'm glad people do. You know live your best life.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you do, it's just it isn't on my life goal. Anyway, this isn't about me. So tell me how you got sort of interested in this. Like, was it your background in social work that really made you interested in really pursuing this in your career now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's a few things I think have led me to explore vaping and what can we do about that? I think one thing that has spurred some interest I'm from California originally, not Indiana. My folks are from Indiana, so we would come out each summer to visit with relatives, and noticing the differences in policy around smoking was something that got my attention even when I was younger, so I could count on one hand the number of folks that I knew who smoked growing up. I knew there were a couple neighbors on our street and then the only other place that I really encountered folks smoking was outside of the airport. Beyond that there weren't a lot of public spaces where people were smoking, Whereas Indiana, when we would come to visit, there was still the smoking section in the restaurant or cigarette vending machines. And even today, now that things have shifted more you look at California about 9.7% of folks are smokers out there, whereas Indiana it's 16.2%. So there is a significant difference. And that's data from the American Lung Association, so kind of the how does policy and environment really affect smoking and even things like sex in the city?
Speaker 2:They joke about California being a difficult place to smoke in one of their episodes, like there's an ongoing gag about Carrie trying to pull out a cigarette and someone saying, ma'am, you can't smoke here. And I've met people in California that actually quit smoking after they moved there because it was such a pain in the butt to find spaces to smoke. So that mostly work with adults. In my current role there's some work with youth, but in the conversations I have had with youth locally, some of them have reported feeling uncomfortable going to the bathroom at their school because there's so many folks vaping in there. I've spoken with administrators who've told me that the youngest children that they have confiscated vapes from were in the third grade, and to me that says we have a problem here. So I started digging into this to learn a little bit more about what is the scope of the issue, what interventions are available and kind of where do we need to move as a community to address this and kind of where do we need to move as a community to address this?
Speaker 1:Okay, so for folks who this isn't necessarily their world, give us sort of a vaping 101. You know what is an e-cigarette or vape? Are they the same? Is it the same as Juuling? Tell me, give us the lowdown.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so e-cigarettes, vapes they're all kind of similar on some level. The Catch my Breath curriculum they describe it as it's kind of similar to like the difference between having, like an iPhone or Android, like they're all basically doing the same thing, but maybe you're packaged a little differently or may have some different options, but the basics are so. Each e-cigarette or vape has a cartridge of some sort that has e-liquid. That can come pre-filled or it might be something that the user fills. It has a sensor so that senses when the user is inhaling on that, which triggers the atomizer. And the atomizer is a heating element that heats the e-liquid so it can become an aerosol. And please note that I mentioned that's an aerosol. It's not just water vapor, because it isn't, and this atomizer heats it up and they can heat these up to 400 degrees in like just a few seconds. There's a battery to operate it. Some vapes also come with what they call a mod box that allows you to modify your vape so you can adjust the voltage, the coils, the wicks and then you have the e-liquid. That's in that and the e-liquid typically is some mixture of water, some sort of food grade flavoring, a choice of nicotine level. Some of them do contain cannabis, so maybe THC, cbd, and there's usually propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin and those are kind of to help with the smoke part. And then nicotine levels. Those can range. There is vape liquid that does not contain nicotine, but usually they come in like three, five, six milligrams. Juul is typically five milligrams of nicotine, so the liquid will contain about the equivalent of 20 cigarettes worth of nicotine. But Juul is a form of e-cigarette or vape which is important to note, because there's a lot of youth out there that when jewel came out, if you asked them, like do you smoke or do you vape, they'd be like no, um, like do you use you jewel? Yeah, well, it's the same thing. So, yeah, um.
Speaker 2:And then flavors uh, there's a lot of them are flavored. Uh, just a cursory look, uh, online I was poking around last night you can find captain crunch flavored vape liquid. Uh, you can find blue slushy jolly rancher. Um, there are tobacco flavored ones too, but usually those are much further down the list than the like fruity, sweet, exciting flavors, yeah, yeah. So that's kind of a quick rundown of what are vapes. And I do want to point out too in 2022, nearly two in three Hoosier middle school students and about three and four high school students reported current use of tobacco had used at least one flavored tobacco product. Wow. So these flavors here, you know it makes it taste less harsh, so it is very much an easier gateway for youth to start smoking because you're not getting that like nasty cigarette flavor initially. It's fruity and it tastes good and it seems interesting and my friends are doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and a lot of youth believe that vapes are less addictive addictive than cigarettes, and so that's an issue, yeah, and then kind of going forward from there, like how safe are these? Yeah that there has been some research suggesting that maybe it's a little bit safer than cigarettes. But safer doesn't mean safe yeah.
Speaker 2:There's some other folks out there, too, that have questioned whether or not that's actually the case as well. Back in 2020, the CDC confirmed about almost 3,000 cases of lung injury. They called it EVALI e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury and 68 deaths that were attributed to that. And the last I checked I would need to check the research. They still weren't entirely sure what was causing that, but that was an issue. There's also some compounds in the e-liquids that are sometimes not good for your lungs, so there's some flavors that they're great. If you're like eating it, yeah, but if you're inhaling it, your lungs aren't meant to handle that. So some cinnamon flavors, for example, are really bad for your lungs.
Speaker 1:Interesting, elisa. I did not that thought did not even occur to me as you were talking about these sort of flavors that it's like, oh yeah, this is going into your lungs. This is a different pathway.
Speaker 2:And the other issue too is when you're heating these things, you've got these different chemicals in there. Sometimes, when you heat things, that creates new compounds chemically and those may have different impacts on your lung health as well. So, like the EVALI, like there were some questions of like, so these ingredients by themselves may not necessarily be bad for your lungs, but together, yeah, something chemically is shifting that's causing that. There's also other chemicals too that have shown up metal particles such as nickel, lead, chromium, tin, aluminum, that your lungs aren't really meant to handle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm still sort of like stuck there. It just has never really. I've never really paused to think about that. Obviously, none of the things that you were describing that are in this are what is supposed to go into your lungs.
Speaker 2:There's only just air that your lungs are really ready for. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever cooked peppers in your house. It can be really nice to eat spicy things, but all of a sudden, when you get that in the air, because cause you're cooking it on a skillet, and you're just like, oh my eyes and like coffee, and you know there's just some things your lungs don't want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, my goodness, okay, okay. So you know, let's say, I'm a parent and I am. I'm listening to this now and I'm thinking gosh, I haven't even talked to my kids about vaping. So we're going to talk about, maybe, what we can do about that, but what would be some signs that a parent or a teacher might see in a kiddo who might be vaping?
Speaker 2:A few things that we might notice. Might notice some shifts with athletic ability or decreased breathing. Okay, um, if they're vaping a lot. So I think I had a friend come to visit, actually, who had started vaping and they're the same age as me, fairly fit too, and we went for a bike ride and I was like are you okay? Yeah, she's really having troubles keeping up. She's like I think I need to cut back on this and I was like, yeah, you might also see difficulties with concentration.
Speaker 2:So nicotine is an upper, and if you are addicted to nicotine or if a youth does start vaping regularly, you know most of these e-liquids do have nicotine in them. You can buy ones that don't have nicotine, but a lot of them do. I'm trying to. I can't remember where this study was, but someone had done one and found like 90% of the e-liquids have nicotine in them. So if you have a youth that's in class and they're waiting to get that next hit of nicotine and they haven't for a while, you might notice some differences in concentration, impulsivity. They might be more irritable or impatient because they're in withdrawal. You might notice some mood swings. If folks are in withdrawal, headaches can come up and there has been some cases too, where, if youth used a lot of nicotine, like seizures can sometimes come up too.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, what can I do as a parent? Let's start with parents and then we'll move on to you know, providers, and then maybe schools, and I'll share some things that are happening in schools that my kids go to. Yeah, what do parents do?
Speaker 2:So a few things parents can do. I mean one is making it clear you don't approve of youth using substances.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And there there has been evidence to show that. You know, when kids feel like their parents don't approve of this, they're less likely to engage in the behavior. Yep, I know this can come up to sometimes where parents are like well, I smoke, like how am I going to talk to my kid about this? And it's like you can say, like I don't think you should do this, or at least you don't get a choice until you're 21. Yeah, and also say you know, I want to stop. Like it's been hard for me. I don't want you to hop on that wagon and not be able to get off either. So you can be very real about like this was not a good choice on my part and own that.
Speaker 2:You also may want to provide reasons why you don't want your kid vaping. Like you know it can affect your athletic ability. Maybe you love sports and I don't want you to lose that. It might affect your ability to focus in class. I expect you to be working on your grades right now. It can also affect your ability to regulate emotions. So vaping we're using nicotine that works on those pleasure pathways in the brain and youth. Their brains are still developing until they're 25. So we don't want to be hijacking that when they're trying to develop impulse control, emotional regulation, good stress management. So those can be some things that you can share. And then just the health issues, like do you know what's in your vape liquid? You can buy vape liquid on Etsy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who knows what's in that.
Speaker 1:We're trusting sources that may not make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're kind of rolling the dice with your health here, and do you really want to do that? Yeah, you can. Also, you know, model good healtheking behavior. Part of the reason, too, this is spiked with youth is there's a lot of influencers who are using Juul and some of the other vape options out there and emphasizing. You know, like TikTok doesn't know all Chat, gpt sometimes lies or hallucinates, as we say. You know, where do I actually find good health information? We can go look at the CDC. We can go look at the Truth Initiative, the American Lung Association, things like that.
Speaker 2:Parent 2, you can get your health provider to back you up. Oh, yeah, you know they should be aware of some of the issues with this and be able to share solid information. You can work with your kid on refusal skills. That's another big one. Do you know how to say no? What situations might come up? Can you share with me where you've seen this at school? How are you going to handle that when someone asks you, knowing the signs too, if your kid starts having nosebleeds? If they're more thirsty, suddenly they want privacy, they're spraying body spray or air freshener around their room. It may not be due to vaping, but if you start seeing this cluster of things, talk to your kid and know where they are. That's the other big one too. If you know where your kid's going, who they're going to be with, and you ask them for that information, that's also a really big help.
Speaker 1:It's not like you have to drive them to the moon and back. I couldn't agree more with the explicitly saying I don't approve of this, and I think there are some parents who think, yeah, my kid doesn't actually care. But I think it does matter for us to make this, this boundary, clear and your kid may still go out and make the choice they're going to make, but I think in the back of their mind, if they heard it from your mouth, that this is clearly against what you are saying is what they're allowed to do. It at least puts that in the back of your child's mind Like I'm not supposed to be doing this yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they hear you, whether they act like they hear you as a separate matter, but they hear you Totally. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I love kind of modeling good health seeking behaviors, because I do. How are your kids seeing the things that you want them to do for themselves? So when I'm stressed, first of all, do I ever tell my kids that I'm stressed? How do they know what does stress look like for mom and then what does mom do when she's stressed? So I think having some real conversations with your teens and tweens about your own emotion and how you're engaging in these health seeking behaviors, you're basically training them every moment of the day, not just with what you're telling them, but with what you're showing them you're doing in your own life. Yeah, absolutely so thinking about how we do that on our own I think matters a lot, and I love the last thing you said about sort of refusal skills. I did a video for a high school recently where we were talking about not just saying no but holding the no.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1:Because that's the hard part, right when it's like, even for us as grownups, if you and I were out having some chips and queso because I freaking love queso, but anyway, if I were to go out and have queso, you know, and you were like, hey, you know, let's have a drink, you know, and my goal or my desire that day was to not have a drink. And so I say no, it might be hard, my initial no might be hard, but then you might just be being a good friend and being like well, you know, I'm going to have a drink, just, you can have some of mine. You know, you're not even like pushing, pushing, pushing. You're really just like having this social inclusion that you're trying to do with me.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, in this video I was telling the teenagers that, like, the first no is one obstacle, but, honestly, the harder obstacle is when all of your friends are like yo bro, like what are you doing? Why don't you just do? I mean, you know, like where they start giving you a hard time or where they start making fun of you, or where you know they go off by themselves, and then you're the only one left. Like holding the no is the biggest struggle, and so I love that you're encouraging parents to walk your kids through what this is going to look like, to prepare them for things they can say and things they can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I was reading a book recently, I think it's called the Power of Saying no, and they talk about the difference between, like, a soft and hard no, and that hard no's are usually more effective. So instead of saying I can't vape right now, my mom would get mad at me or I don't want to at the moment, say I don't vape.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And like making that a line and people are more likely to respect that when you kind of give that like I don't do that, this is part of my lifestyle, this is not a negotiable thing and it doesn't have to be mean, but just kind of a like firm, I don't do that.
Speaker 1:I don't and I won't and I don't want to, and it's over. Yeah, that's good. Okay, so we've talked about parents. What are some things that providers like you and I might be able to do in helping folks with this?
Speaker 2:One piece is just screening, like if you are a health provider, if you are a social worker, psychologist, are you actually screening youth for vape usage? Yeah, there's a few really short screening tools out there. Stanford medicine actually has a really nice page that has a list of what those are and, based on responses to those two, maybe additional questionnaires you might want to use, like the hooked on nicotine checklist which assesses kind of level of addiction to nicotine. So if you get a youth who says yes, I'm vaping, well, are you vaping once a month or is this like a daily thing? Because that may have some implications for whether or not they need assistance with vaping cessation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's some studies out there that there are a lot of youth that actually try to stop vaping once they end up going down that path and they're doing it by themselves. If you're under 21, like there isn't, you know, or I guess I think under 18, I would have to double check the age range. But if you're a minor you can't go out and get like nicotine cessation aids on your own, so that's already a barrier. So if you're concerned about what your parents are going to do and you're having trouble stopping, it gets complicated quickly.
Speaker 2:Also, learning to recognize signs of vaping in young people, and if you're not trained in motivational interviewing, you know that's a really great tool as well, and that is an intervention that we're looking at what stage of change a person is in. So someone who's like we're going to use alcohol as an example here like I, don't have an alcohol problem that's a very different situation than hey, I think I have a problem, I'd like to do something about it, but I don't know what to do can be really effective asking permission before sharing information too, and very much personalizing it as well. So, for example, if you keep vaping at this current level, here are some of the health outcomes that we would expect to see with you based on that behavior. What do you think about that? Or how is vaping impacting your life? What is it getting in the way of? But also recognizing there's probably some things you like about it because you keep doing it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's great. So I think about clinicians who I guess I'll pull back the curtain here and say, like a good thing to just include in your intake conversation, just like do you drink alcohol, do you smoke cigarettes, do you vape or Juul or use e-cigarettes? And part of where I was going next is that I think it's easy for us to allow our biases to skip over this question and not do the screening right To not be like oh well, I should ask this question directly of my client when I'm sort of like well, this person probably doesn't vape. They don't look like a person who would vape, but clearly that's rooted in bias. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, cause you don't know, yeah, and some of that may be contributing to to what they're coming in for. Like, if they come in for anxiety, maybe they're getting too much nicotine and that is making them anxious, so you might be missing out on an intervention that, could you know, might be easier to address than some longer term things.
Speaker 1:I love that and I think you know, like the work you're doing in Wayne County, providers might also look for additional things in their community to help teens get connected to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so knowing what resources are out there that you can refer teens to, because there are some options like Indiana has a like Quit Now Indiana team so you can chat online with a coach. They have some videos and quizzes on there. Truth Initiative also has kind of a text-based program that will encourage folks with quitting and there's some group intervention formats, like the Not on Tobacco Initiative from American Lung Association where you can have a group cessation that providers could offer.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. I love that throughout this whole thing, you've been sharing resources, so thank you for your diligence in sharing those things. That's amazing. So what can schools do?
Speaker 2:So schools? There's a lot of different stuff that schools can do. One basic thing train your staff on how to recognize vapes and e-cigarettes.
Speaker 2:I mean, they're kind of changing all the time. The old school ones were like the first generation ones were meant to look like cigarettes. The newer models that are out there are kind of like sleeker, like, have lots of pretty colors, and others are made to look more like USB devices. So some of them just like, frankly, look like school supplies. So kind of knowing what you're looking for, yeah, is helpful. Making sure staff are trained on what policies and like local resources are out there, and kind of having a no wrong door approach can be helpful. But, yeah, one thing that I would love to share. So Richmond High School some of the students there during our youth summit a couple of years ago identified vaping as an issue and they made this amazing poster of what to do if you catch a youth vaping and instead of going straight to punishment it had questions like why are you vaping? What's going on with you that led you to vape? Are you okay? What's going on with you that led you to vape? Are you okay? Kind of thinking about what does that student need? Because a lot of times we don't use substances when we feel great, because we're feeling good. Yep, we start to use substances when we don't like the reality we're living because we want to shift that, and that is true for vaping. And that is true for vaping. They found in the Indiana Tobacco Youth Survey that youth who are feeling psychological distress are more likely to be vaping, that it might be that youth don't have enough coping skills and they need some of that.
Speaker 2:School policies in our area and a lot of them are punitive. Is there some proactive statement in your policy manual that says if you come to us and say I want help, you won't get punished Because it is a health issue. If you're addicted to nicotine, it's going to be hard to stop and you probably do need support or there might be other stuff going on in your life. So maybe also making it clear in there under what circumstances will parents be notified? Yep, but a lot of them are kind of focused on what will happen to you on the sports team. But we need to recognize this may affect all of our youth. They do need assistance and how can we promote that? And there's some model examples online too. If you look around for model vaping policies for schools, a few initiatives have come out with some language that you can put in your school policies or things to think about.
Speaker 1:That's really helpful. I know one of the local schools has vape detectors which I am still like trying to wrap my head around Like how does that work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so those can be a little. Those catch you after you're vaping. So like that's not addressing the preventative part, which hopefully the school could be offering some education on vaping to youth. And like Catch my Breath has a really great like evidence-based program that you can use in middle school and high school. But vape detectors also like it can be hard to know who was in the bathroom vaping if a whole bunch of kids come out, yeah, yeah. And like Wired Magazine has an article about all the ways youth have discovered to get past vape detectors. Yeah, they're so creative when they need to be right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Like I can think back to middle school and like I know they're so creative when they need to be right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Like I can think back to middle school and, like you know, just even passing notes, like the links that we went to to make sure we're hiding it from the teacher, like you know, popping open your highlighter and stuffing your note in there and passing that to a friend, like you know there's. But if there's a will there is a way, and a lot of these devices are kind of small and easy to hide so you can install vape detectors. But you do need to be thinking about all these other pieces too of what do you do when you catch someone. How do we keep someone from vaping to begin with?
Speaker 1:What is our role as the school in trying to help prevent, when we know it is sort of a I mean it's a physiological addiction? I think there's a balance for the schools of, yes, we want to minimize it and we want to try to prevent it, but also, like gosh, how do we help these kids who are already addicted?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, like I said, that policy piece can be a big one of like, what do we do when we catch you vaping? Suspension could be making things worse, Like if I'm vaping because I don't feel good and then you're going to kick me out of school for a bit, is that really helping the problem? So some schools have actually set things up where, if you're caught vaping, either your family pays a fine or they take you to a treatment program, and usually the fine is pretty close to the cost of the treatment program. Wow, and not all parents are taking that, but that's one way that folks have tried to address that. But yeah, in some schools had there's some education options that you can provide. So if you catch someone, maybe you can have the youth go through that education program on vaping, the dangers of it. What are some alternatives? Work with them on more coping skills so that it is more likely that when they try to stop, they're successful.
Speaker 2:I mean, this has been so informative. Is there anything that you forgot or still wanted to make sure you shared? Today, 30 Indiana middle school students reported current so like past 30-day use of any tobacco product in 2022. And most of those were electronic cigarettes. So we have seen like cigarette smoking dropping for a couple of decades, which is great, Like it's a great public health intervention. But with vaping we're seeing that going back up. And then one other thing too that I think is kind of unique about vaping that I didn't think about much until I ran into this. I used to work in a locked mental health facility and one of the clients I worked with, his mom, heard that vaping could potentially help you cut back on cigarettes and she was like great, I'll get him a va vape and he burned through the vape liquid in like no time and so when you smoke a cigarette you smoke a unit yeah and you know you're done.
Speaker 2:But vaping there isn't like a clear you've smoked x amount of nicotine or vape liquid. It's kind of it's harder to gauge so you might find yourself smoking more and not really notice. Oh, wow, um. So there, there's some issues with that too that I I haven't seen really addressed much in the literature but could come up with for folks as well and makes it kind of more of that gateway for youth. If you're, you start smoking kind of the lower stuff and then, as we're getting addicted, using more, getting the higher grade nicotine there.
Speaker 1:Well, and for teenagers, whose stage of development is maybe this draw towards impulsivity, towards I'm going to do what I want to do, towards I'm invincible towards you know what I want to do, towards I'm invincible towards you know everyone else is doing it and I'm just going to keep doing it too. Like without that physical marker of oh, the cigarette is out, like I've smoked this all the way to the end it's. I can imagine how dangerous that becomes.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like infinite scroll on social media. There's no like natural stop to this and you can just keep going with the doom scrolling Wow.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's that's powerful. That's no natural stop to this. You can just keep going with the doom scrolling Wow, wow, that's powerful. That's powerful, anything else that you forgot today.
Speaker 2:I think that's it for now.
Speaker 1:This has been fun though it's great, I mean, for a topic like this, which is so important for our young people. I just think, gosh, more information here the better, and I can imagine that there is a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of, I mean, that invincibility of our teenagers who they just think it won't happen to me, it'll happen to somebody else, and gosh, what a responsibility we all should carry to try to prevent and minimize this public health risk as much as we can. Yeah, so thank you for the work that you're doing and steps that you all are making, and maybe, if there's anyone who wants to hear more from you or reach out, learn about any of this work, how can they reach you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm based in our Wayne County Extension Office, so we can be reached at 765-973-9281. Or you can reach out to me by email at E-W-O-R-L-A-N-D, at P-U-R-D-u-e dot edu.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, elisa. I appreciate all the work you're doing, that you said yes to being here. I'm thankful for Carrie Meyer, who is our mutual colleague, who connected us for this important topic, and I know we have other topics that we can cover, and so this is just one of the first episodes that we'll record together until we find another thing we are excited about sharing, about Excellent. Looking forward to it. That's going to be great. All right, y'all. Thank you for listening, and until next time, stay safe and stay well.
