Vaping popular with teenagers

Vaping is popular with US teenagers, with more than one-third of high school students reporting in 2015 having tried electronic cigarettes, according to a story by Rachel Becker for The Verge (Vox Media), citing a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP).

And teenagers aren’t always using electronic cigarettes to deliver nicotine.

To evaluate electronic cigarette use, the CDCP and the US Food and Drug Administration examined surveys filled out by 17,000 middle and high school students across the US in 2015.

About 38 percent of high school students and 13 percent of middle school students reported that they had tried electronic cigarettes.

The story indicated that those figures could be underestimates since the students were reporting their own behavior and since surveys based on self-reports were known to be unreliable.

It wasn’t clear whether that lack of reliability could mean also that the figures were overestimates or not meaningful.

In the latest CDCP report, one-third of electronic cigarette users reported using their devices for something other than nicotine.

The report didn’t specify what the students were using their vaping devices for, if not for nicotine delivery, but other studies were said to have pointed to pot as the most likely substance.

More than half of the electronic cigarette vapers used refillable systems, as opposed to disposable devices.

Although most of the students didn’t know what brand of electronic cigarette they were using, the ones who did used blu and VUSE most frequently.