Last week, we learned about drugs. Each of us could choose one specific drug to research, and I chose vaping. Vaping is a new, smokeless way to get nicotine. Nicotine is a highly addictive drug that increases your heart rate, releases adrenaline, and makes your brain release dopamine, which is the chemical that makes you feel happy. Because vaping is so new, scientists don’t know what the long-term effects will be. When vaping was first introduced, people thought that it was a better alternative than smoking. They assumed that it came with fewer health risks, but it was so new that nobody knew much about it. They also liked the fact that it was smokeless and easy to hide, because it looked like a pen. In the beginning, everyone thought that it was a better, low-risk alternative to smoking. They were wrong, but they couldn’t know until it was too late. Even though vaping did seem like a better alternative at first, it’s actually as bad, if not worse, than smoking. It is addictive, and it can cause lung disease, cancer, raw and bloody throats and mouths, a chronic cough, and many other life-threatening problems. Vaping also affects special cells called fibroblasts, which are responsible for healing wounds. The chemicals in the vape weaken these cells, which causes wounds to heal extremely slowly. There are many people all around the world suffering the consequences of vaping, and teens make up the majority of vapers. No one knows exactly why this is, but some people think it’s either because they don’t fully understand the risks, were peer-pressured into it, or they are just attracted to the fruity flavors and become addicted to the nicotine.
I chose to research vaping, because it’s a newly introduced drug that no one knows much about, especially compared to other drugs like cocaine or heroin or crystal meth. I wanted to find out exactly how much we know about this new drug. Even though we still don’t know what the long-term effects will be, we are starting to find out more about the short-term effects. Also, one out of every ten teens vape. This is directly impacting my generation, and I wanted to know the full risks. I also think that more teens should be educated about the true risks of vaping, even though at the beginning, before anyone knew anything, teens couldn’t have been educated about this. Now that we are starting to understand more, we should try to spread the word about the life-threatening risks that come with vaping.
Would vapes be easier to resist if they didn’t taste like fruit? How do vapes work without the burning of tobacco? Were they designed to look like pens on purpose or was that just a coincidence?
