Warning! Nicotine poses special risks to teens

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The next time someone offers you their e-cigarette, you might want to think twice before taking a puff. You’re not just vaping water with some added flavoring. You’ll be inhaling a cloud of other ingredients, too, such propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine. These are generally thought to be safe for use in food. But we don’t know that it’s safe to pull them into our lungs. Vape liquids also contain metals, formaldehyde and other toxic ingredients. But among the most concerning ingredients in most vape liquids is nicotine.

“A lot of teens get their vaping products from their friends,” says Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin. She is an addiction psychiatrist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. “They don’t necessarily purchase them or do the research on them,” she points out. And that means they don’t know what they’re inhaling when they start to puff.

Krishnan-Sarin studies teen vaping. She’s found that teens are most likely to use non-refillable (also known as closed system) devices. These small, easy-to-hide products — such as JUUL and Puff Bar — don’t create an obvious vape cloud. This makes them easy to use almost anywhere. In fact, Krishnan-Sarin says, “Kids would tell us they were using these products in the classroom.”

Before COVID (the last time she was able to study teen vaping habits), many teens “were puffing on [an e-cigarette] almost constantly throughout the day,” she says.

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