No one could ever predict that what began as an attempt to neutralize adult smoking would evolve into a nicotine epidemic among the youth. Juul is a spin-off created by the American company Pax Labs. Juul Labs was founded on May 22, 2015, by Adam Bowen and James Monsees. They make the Juul e-cigarette, which packages nicotine salts from leaf tobacco into one-time use cartridges. Juuls look like USB flash drives and can fit easily in the palm of a hand.
“The e-cigarette consists of a battery, a heating element and a cartridge that contains a liquid suspension containing nicotine. When a user inhales from the cartridge, the liquid is heated and vapor is emitted. The nicotine is obtained from tobacco plants. (Washington Post). Individually, Juuls are valued at around 15 dollars per device, and are sold at 16 dollars for 4 “pods”1. Its variety in flavors (such as mango, creme, and fruit) appeal to younger audiences, in contrast to traditional tobacco-flavored cigarettes. The company currently generates 2 billion dollars in revenue per year.
The Dangers of Adolescent Juuling
In 2016, a Surgeon General’s Report concluded that “youth use of nicotine in any form, including e-cigarettes, is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain.” The FDA, the National Cancer Institute and National Institute on Drug Abuse find that some 27.5% of high school students and 10.5% of eighth-graders say they currently use e-cigarettes (nearly double from the previous year!), and more than half of both groups use Juul as their e-cigarette of choice. In recent months, more than 2,500 people have ended up in the hospital due to severe lung illnesses and other health problems after vaping — and at least 54 people have died.
Misinformation has played a key role in underage drug abuse:
Because it is not a requirement for manufacturers to list the ingredients of which e-cigarettes are comprised of, buyers remain unaware of the dangerous chemicals inside. E-cigarette aerosol is NOT harmless “water vapor.” As of 2020, Juuls have only been around for a couple of years, and not enough research has been collected on the long-term effects of Juuling.
However, this is what the current research finds: Juuls expose the user’s lungs to harmful chemicals like formaldehyde, acrolein, and acetaldehyde, which are known to cause irreversible lung damage. Vapes get their flavors from hazardous chemicals. For instance, some buttery-flavored pods contain diacetyl and acetoin. Inhaling diacetyl has been linked to popcorn lung, a lung disease that doesn’t have a cure. Vaping delivers nicotine to the brain in as little as 10 seconds. Because Juul pods are derived from nicotine salts, the concentration is higher than traditional standards. One pod is the equivalent of the amount of nicotine in one pack of cigarettes (so much for being a “better replacement”!). A teen’s brain is still developing, making it more vulnerable to nicotine addiction. Nicotine exposure during the teen years can disrupt normal brain development. It may have long-lasting effects, like increased impulsivity and mood disorders. Vape aerosol could be delivering metal particles like chromium, nickel, lead, tin, and aluminum right into your lungs. Some of these metals are toxic.
In addition, Juuls contain volatile organic compounds and cancer-causing carcinogens.
In late October of last year, a former Juul executive filed a lawsuit alleging the startup shipped out 1 million contaminated Juul pods but failed to notify customers–an example of how Juulers have no idea what they are putting in their lungs.
Last July, a Connecticut man filed a lawsuit against Juul as well. Maxwell Berger, now in his early twenties, became addicted to Juuls in 2015 as a teenager. As a result of his crippling dependency, Berger “had a massive hemorrhagic stroke, which required three brain surgeries and more than 100 days in the hospital. It left him with ‘catastrophic and permanent injuries’ such as left side paralysis, speech impairment and a 50% loss of vision from both eyes.”
An instance of how much the general population doesn’t understand about the safety of vape products overall presented itself in March of 2018: 17-year-old Austin Burton was vaping at home when he saw a flash and felt a sharp pain in his jaw. As it turned out, he had to be rushed to emergency care to treat “a major fracture of his lower jaw, including about a 2-centimeter piece that had exploded and was missing, and he was also missing multiple teeth. The surgeons had to put a plate under his gum.” His doctor said that she “believed the injury was caused by an exploding battery.”
An anonymous Juuler from the D.C. area says the illnesses haven’t made him or his friends quit, partly because vaping is a big part of teen culture — and also because they think it won’t happen to them.
“I feel like, for a lot of people, that’s just a chance they’re willing to take,” he says. “I don’t think a lot of kids are thinking about the future.”
Juuling and MoCo
Within the past year, Herbert Hoover Middle School has called three assemblies to address the school’s struggle with underage Juuling. They listed consequences that ranged from suspension to expulsion, and even intervention from law enforcement. Last year, three students from Hoover were expelled for Juuling on school property. Even so, users remain at the middle school. Just two weeks ago, a student at Hoover was suspended for Juuling. The reason why it’s hard to root out who is Juuling is that students are aware of those who vape. But because of vape culture at schools, students see reporting peers to the authorities as a way of snitching and looking to get beat up.
At Hoover specifically, almost all the students are aware of Juulers and their identities at the school. Despite it being illegal for minors (below 21) to access Juuls, users have accessed e-cigarettes through parents, high schoolers, and even vape shops/gas stations that are willing to sell to minors. High schoolers profit from selling Juuls to middle-schoolers. Despite the retail price being reasonably low (15$), Hoover students buy Juuls priced from 60-200 dollars. Stashed fruity flavored pods such as mango are still used by middle schoolers despite them being recalled. Siblings or older friends are the primary gateways to how the middle schoolers can access Juuls (and how they began using)
Middle school is just the beginning. Last spring, “three students at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Md., were taken via ambulance to emergency rooms in two separate incidents after vaping THC.” In response, Churchill High School students and administrators have launched a massive education plan to help quell student fervor. Of the 2,700 students who attend Churchill, over 1,350 of them vape, student leaders state.
A Northwest HS graduate was hospitalized in December of 2019. She had a consistently high fever of 104 degrees. At first, “doctors did not know what was wrong with her because they could not pinpoint the cause of her symptoms. The patient writes that doctors performed a CT scan on her lungs and found that the tissue had been destroyed. She is still in the hospital connected to intravenous fluids and receiving steroidal treatment.” On an Instagram post, the now-college student wrote that “healthy lungs on a scan should be black. My 19-year-old lungs were completely hazy and white in the scans, entirely covering both lungs…They couldn’t determine whether the scans were showing fluid, blood, bacteria, infection, etc, so they were still unable to treat the cause of my symptoms. After conducting many more tests and a bronchoscopy, it was determined that there was no infection and that my lung tissue was just completely destroyed from using Juuls and vapes and oil cartridges.”
At the start of the school year, three males from Clarksburg (only one was a student from Clarksburg High School) were charged with robbing a Churchill student at gunpoint. It turned out to be a drug deal gone wrong. The victim was the dealer and the suspects were the intended buyers, police note. The lengths that the perpetrators went to in order to obtain Juul pods are startling, new sources express. Not only have Juuls brought health concerns to MoCo, but they have increased criminal activity as well.
The Juul epidemic seems too close to home, and entirely too real for many students in Montgomery County. Despite MoCo’s best efforts to eliminate youth vaping, the issue remains. Merely presenting the consequences of vaping is not enough, and schools should consider implementing more programs to help teens struggling with addiction.
Article by Cynthea Wang of Herbert Hoover Middle School
Graphic by Nicole Fang of Richard Montgomery High School