Vaping is Such a Breeze
As cigarettes take the exit, alternative nicotine products become more popular than ever
—By Nikolas Plonski and Kahler Tomlin
Imagine this: Friday night, at Brown Jug with your friends, celebrating the end of midterms. You’ve had a few too many to drink and a friend offers you a Breeze. Sure, the piña colada flavor is enticing, but in your current state, you are unaware of the potential consequences of nicotine addiction.
For many college students, this was their introduction to nicotine use. In recent years, younger people have strayed away from traditional cigarettes and opted for more contemporary vapes. These devices differentiate themselves from conventional cigarettes in many ways. The most relevant products include a vast variety of flavors, allowing users to easily smoke in public due to a lack of ordinance and carcinogenic smoke emitted. This is a far cry from the typical smoky tobacco cigarettes and their numerous regulations in the United States.
What is the problem?
Per the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 14.9 percent of adults in the United States have used an e-cigarette at least once and only 3.2 percent are active users. This means that there are currently 8.1 million active e-cigarette users in the United States today. Demographically, the greatest number of users are white men aged 18 to 24. The potential for e-cigarette manufacturers to continually grow is unfathomable due to the originality and the mass appeal of their products. For example, vape manufacturer Breeze Smoke offers disposable products that allow users to have 2,000 puffs of a vape containing five percent nicotine. The Breeze Pro product comes in numerous different flavors, including Candy Cane, Strawmelon, Grape Soda, and Tropical Summer.
What is the appeal?
Wild Side Smoke Shop (209 E Liberty St) is a local e-cigarette smoke shop easily accessible to downtown Ann Arbor residents. We spoke with their manager Thomas Sheffer, who has been a long-time user of various e-cigarettes and other products. Sheffer has years of experience in the smoking industry, managing various smoke shops in cities and college towns. Sheffer began to vape during his freshman year of college. “I had a friend that did it, and I just wanted to feel like a dragon. With all the clouds and stuff.” At first, Sheffer began smoking vape products that featured zero nicotine. Once he found a mint flavor that had nicotine in it, he was hooked. Aided by his current position at Wild Side, he has stuck with e-cigarettes that include nicotine to this day.
To gauge an opinion from a current college student, we spoke with a U-M sophomore, whom we will refer to as John Smith for privacy reasons. We asked him about how he was drawn to nicotine and why he has continued his addiction. Smith has been using nicotine products for roughly two years. He was personally introduced to nicotine vape products by his friends from home. When asked why he continues to use nicotine, he stated, “I enjoy how it makes me feel.” What he feels is the buzz that comes with nicotine use. According to Vaping Daily, “Some of the immediate effects of the nicotine buzz are calmness, pleasurable sensations, feeling relaxed and euphoric, more focus and energy.” As a college student, the chance of being relaxed amidst a constantly stressful schedule can be an alluring feature for many interested in the substance. Furthermore, nicotine is reported to enhance concentration and may thus be appealing to students in their studies and classwork. To learn more about e-cigarette use in young adults, we spoke with a recent MSU graduate, whom has been given the alias of David. David says that he uses vapes “occasionally.” He uses them because of their high nicotine concentration. David started using e-cigarettes, “the summer after my senior year of high school when I was working a job that involved physical labor.”
Frequent consumers of these products use e-cigarettes for a number of reasons. Sheffer uses vapes with nicotine because, “It’s a nice pallet cleanser, that kind of thing. I think a part of the reason I hoped on was because of my ADHD. I just had that oral fixation.” Due to Sheffer’s unique position as store manager of an e-cigarette distributor, he has unique insights as to why these products have become so popular amongst young adults.
Sheffer’s firm belief in the uptick of young adults using disposable vapes is the flavors. “[The reason] the Breezes that have dominated the Michigan market, is the consistency of the flavor. Most disposables would have really good flavor at first and then it just ages and ages and gets worse. These Breezes just stay consistent to the very last hit. I think that’s why people catch on to certain brands.” Furthermore, he notes that newer brands like Breeze have been better sellers since the banning of the JUUL. On June 23, 2022 the FDA denied the authorization for firms to market JUUL products. FDA commissioner Robert M. Califf, M.D., said that this ban was due to the “FDA’s commitment to ensuring that all e-cigarette and electronic nicotine delivery system products currently being marketed to consumers meet our public health standards.” Furthermore, studies done by JUUL on their product were inconsistent and showed that the products sold could contain harmful substances.
Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, Sheffer has noticed an increase in the demand for nicotine. He pointed out that the pandemic was a big spark in the sale of nicotine, “I would say that’s when we really started selling in large volumes.” What makes this gradual and then sudden increase in customers interesting is the demographic makeup of the customers driving the recent boom. Sheffer notes, “In these college towns, it’s about 60-70% students and grad students.” This would align with the CDC’s key findings in their Electronic Cigarette Use Among U.S. Adults, 2018 report that concludes that e-cigarette use is most prevalent among 18 to 24-year-old adults.
What can be learned?
Sure, the increase in nicotine use is evident from a consumer standpoint, but what does it mean for the health of future generations? To learn more, we spoke to Lara Coughlin, Ph.D. She is an Assistant Professor in the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry at the U-M Addiction Center where her research is aimed to “improve access to empirically-based substance use prevention and treatments, especially in underserved populations.” She began her research into nicotine addiction in 2012. Dr. Coughlin stated, “nicotine is a stimulant…. Other stimulants that you know are going to come to mind like caffeine and cocaine. When you have stimulants, what really gets to the heart of things is how addictive different substances are, and I mean like the biological dependence and nicotine is quite addictive.”
Dr. Coughlin says that stimulant addiction is, “Hard…once you have a physiological dependence…it’s a really challenging thing to just sort of up and decide to stop using.” For any potential user trying to stop cold turkey or wean off of stimulants, the individual will have symptoms such as, “a headache for a couple of days…but there really is a struggle with stopping like it’s much more challenging,” per Dr. Coughlin. This is why she calls stimulants, “One of the most challenging substances to actually stop the use of.”
The addictive quality of nicotine is an important issue to ponder when discussing the potential adverse effects of e-cigarettes. However, the long-term effects of frequent e-cigarette use are not yet fully understood. “We’re still sort of trying to figure them out as a field,” Dr. Coughlin states. This can be challenging for experts such as Dr. Coughlin who are trying to warn the public of the potential dangers of e-cigarette use. One example from recent history is the history of traditional cigarettes, which were considered unsafe for use by the 1960s. The market demand for new products often outpaces public health officials and leaves unsuspecting users’ health in the crossfire of a public health catastrophe. “This is often a challenge that we’ve seen historically,” says Dr. Coughlin. “The tobacco market starts creating and selling products well before public health officials really understand the public health impact of their products. So, the result is the consumer market outpacing what we know in empirically-based scientific understanding and public health products. The stock market is always two steps ahead so people end up becoming physiologically dependent on the product. A lot of people have a product preference, and by the time public health officials and policymakers catch up you already have a whole consumer base that’s using these products, making it really hard to then put in regulations.” This can create generational addictions that can potentially lead to massive health implications later in life.
The risks faced by young adults aged 18-24 are particularly pronounced per Dr. Coughlin. “It’s (vapor) a really direct route of getting that nicotine into your bloodstream, and one of the challenges of vapes is also that the potency of nicotine in them can vary. And so, as you have people that are using a really getting a using a route of administration that get sneak a team into their blood really quickly, and also using products that potentially have high potency you end up with a mixture of things which can lead to getting people addicted.” This ultimately means that younger adults are exposed to extremely high doses of nicotine with a rapid onset of effects, with a substance that has highly addictive qualities. This has the potential to create a positive feedback loop for new potential addicts. This is due to the onset of nicotine and its effects. Dr. Coughlin’s professional opinion is that this rapid onset of nicotine addiction due to its qualities as a stimulant is, “a real risk among young adults and older adults.”
Furthermore, the fact that many young people are getting involved in smoking e-cigarette vapor is troubling due to the fact that these devices are not being used for their supposed intended purpose. That being, harm reduction from traditional tobacco cigarettes. Dr. Coughlin states, “If someone is initiating nicotine use it does probably not harm reduction because they don’t have, they’re not already dependent on nicotine for someone who’s like a 30-year smoker using any cigarette might cause additional harm.” It’s important to note that e-cigarettes and vapor with nicotine certainly do have their benefits for individuals with substance abuse. The potential for long-term smokers to substitute carcinogenic tobacco smoke for flavored vapor with a hint of nicotine provided by e-cigarettes does provide potential risk mitigation to long-time cigarette smokers and could lead to users weaning off recreational products that are detrimental to the user health. However, young people adopting nicotine e-cigarette use prior to frequent use of traditional cigarettes here is, “going to promote dependency,” per Dr. Coughlin.
What does the future hold?
Many organizations are recognizing the prevalence of nicotine in the younger generations of Americans and are trying to combat this. Efforts like the Truth Initiative “spread the truth about smoking, vaping, and nicotine through our rigorous scientific research and policy studies,” with the stated goal of ending tobacco use and nicotine dependence. The 2016 National Youth Tobacco Survey that states the three reasons that young people use e-cigarettes are: a close family member or friend uses these products, the availability of a multitude of appealing flavors for the vapor, and the prevailing belief that e-cigarettes and vapes are considered safer than traditional tobacco products.
The future health of young adults addicted to nicotine is very uncertain. Because so much is unknown about potential health risks and due to the fact that young people seem to be more willing to explore the world of e-cigarettes. The tobacco industry has slowly been gaining ground on the youth of America, very similar to their parents and grandparents with tobacco cigarettes. Without a doubt, e-cigarettes can be a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes, but efforts by truth and research by Dr. Coughlin can answer questions about the new world of e-cigarettes. For now, all we can do is wait and see what insight scientific research can teach us about e-cigarettes because the future for vape-dependent individuals is uncertain.
Feature photo, Man smoking; photo credit, Koke Mayayo