The percentage of American middle and high school students who have used e-cigarettes more than doubled from 2011 to 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in Friday’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are battery-powered devices that provide doses of nicotine and other additives to the user in aerosol form. Depending on the brand, e-cigarette cartridges typically contain nicotine, a component to produce the aerosol (e.g., propylene glycol or glycerol), and flavorings (e.g., fruit, mint, or chocolate), the report explained.
Data from the 2011 and 2012 National Youth Tobacco Survey, a questionnaire given to US middle and high school students, were used to estimate e-cigarette use among students in grades 6–12:
- 3.3% in 2011 → 6.8% in 2012: used e-cigarettes at least once
- 1.1% in 2011 → 2.1% in 2012: used e-cigarettes within the last month
E-cigarettes are now unregulated unless they’re marketed for therapeutic purposes, and most states don’t have any restrictions on the their sale to minors. They’re also perceived as cool and safer for the environment than conventional cigarettes because they don’t release tar, carbon monoxide, or other poisons that conventional cigarette smoke contains.
But in addition to nicotine, e-cigarettes do deliver some irritants, genotoxins, and animal carcinogens to the user. These are harmful, but the folks at the CDC are probably more concerned about nicotine use by adolescents, which may impede their brain development. They also worry that the use of e-cigarettes could lead to addiction—nicotine is the addictive drug in cigarettes—which could lead to the use of conventional cigarettes or other tobacco products.
“The increased use of e-cigarettes by teens is deeply troubling,” the Washington Post quoted CDC Director Tom Frieden as saying. “Nicotine is a highly addictive drug. Many teens who start with e-cigarettes may be condemned to struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine and conventional cigarettes.”
Proponents of e-cigarettes take issue with that, though, saying the use of e-cigarettes to deliver nicotine helps smokers decrease their use of conventional cigarettes.
“Given the rapid increase in use and youths’ susceptibility to social and environmental influences to use tobacco, developing strategies to prevent marketing, sales, and use of e-cigarettes among youths is critical,” the report’s authors conclude.
Extrapolating from these data, an estimated 1.78 million US students have used e-cigarettes as of 2012. Other findings include 1.6 percent of students in middle and high school report having used both e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes within the last month in the 2012 survey. That’s also up from 2011, when the rate was 0.8 percent. Also, among students in 2012 who used e-cigarettes within the last month, 76.3 percent reported smoking conventional cigarettes within the last month as well.
