Nicotine resurgence feared

An article in The New England Journal of Medicine says that vaping among teens in the United States is increasing at an alarming rate, flinging the country back into a potential tobacco/nicotine epidemic.

“We fear that the creation of a generation of nicotine-addicted teenagers will lead to a resurgence in the use of combustible tobacco in the decades to come,” the article says. “Even if these adolescents do not switch to regular cigarettes, creation of a large cohort of nicotine-addicted adults has consequences beyond the adverse physiological effects of nicotine.”

Harold Farber, a professor of pediatric pulmonology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, USA, predicts the rate of teenage e-cigarette use will continue to climb as it has since 2001. According to the article, the only time overall nicotine use among youth stayed stagnant was in 2016 because the FDA ruled that e-cigarettes couldn’t be sold to people under the age of 18.

“Up until 2010, we had been conquering the tobacco epidemic,” Farber said. “This is huge.”