Student vaping epidemic has California schools frantically mobilizing – Los Angeles Times

Students at Crescenta Valley High School have created an anti-vaping app. At nearby Rosemont Middle School, 55 students have joined an anti-vaping club. Santa Monica schools have booked 20 anti-vaping and drug awareness student assemblies and parent meetings. Staffers at various Southern California campuses are stepping up patrols of hidden nooks, installing costly detection devices, bringing in addiction counselors and modifying health curricula.

The recent surge of lung illnesses and deaths linked to vaping, an increasingly entrenched habit among many youths, largely caught school authorities flat-footed, and educators are urgently mobilizing anti-vaping efforts against what they see as a dangerous teen epidemic.“We’ve seen this develop very quickly,” said Crescenta Valley Principal Linda Junge. “We’re seeing a public health crisis that has come onto campus.”Experts foresee long-term problems for a generation of students.

“The use of these products is not only creating a whole new generation of young people who are addicted to nicotine and will spend the rest of their life buying nicotine in one form or another … it’s reducing all the kind of gains we’ve made during the ’90s and the 2000s getting youth not to take up smoking,” said Dr. James Sargent, a pediatrics professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.Rosemont Middle School Principal Scott Anderle recalled confronting an eighth-grader, “a nice kid and a good student,” asking why he was vaping in the classroom. Why couldn’t he even wait for the class to end?

“He looked at me with sad eyes and said, ‘I can’t stop.’”

Source: Student vaping epidemic has California schools frantically mobilizing – Los Angeles Times