Healthline: Debate Will Heat Up in 2019 Over Vaping, E-Cigarettes

By Christoper Curley 

Have electronic cigarettes and vaping devices replaced cigarettes as the public health nuisance of our time?

New research suggests we’re heading in that direction.

The number of high school seniors who vaped in the past 12 months increased to 37 percent, up from 28 percent in 2017, according to the latest findings of the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s 2018 Monitoring the Future report.

In November 2018, in response to rising vaping trends, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb directed the agency to restrict — but not outright ban — the sale of flavored e-cigarettes and vaping products to help curb the burgeoning epidemic.

“I will not allow a generation of children to become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarettes,” he wrote in a statement. “We won’t let this pool of kids, a pool of future potential smokers, of future disease and death, to continue to build.”

Moreover, e-cigarettes and nicotine vaping products have higher concentrations of nicotine than traditional cigarettes, said Dr. Jennifer Lowry, director of the division of clinical pharmacology, toxicology, and therapeutic innovations at Children’s Mercy-Kansas City and chair of the AAP’s Council on Environmental Health.

“You’re going to have a harder time getting them off of it because of the addiction potential,” she told Healthline.

Read the full story via Healthline

Learn more about Pharmacology and Toxicology at Children's Mercy