Vaping at Younger Ages

A recent report out of Australia should serve as a wake-up call for our need to talk to our children and teens about the dangers of vaping. The Australian anti-tobacco campaign is known as Quit, and it sponsors a Quitline phone service where those struggling with tobacco addiction can receive help and advice. One of the program’s directors, Dr. Sarah White, is reporting that the Quitline is receiving calls that are unprecedented in the program’s thirty-year history. Teenagers as young as thirteen years old are calling in for help because they are addicted to vaping. White says, “when you smoke a cigarette, you have ten or fifteen puffs, and then you stop and you throw it away. You can look at the packet and say ‘I’ve got ten left’. But with e-cigarettes we’re talking about up to twenty-four-hundred puffs per pen. So that’s two hundred and forty cigarettes., and there’s no natural stopping point.” Parents, these anti-tobacco conversations need to begin at a young age, and never end.