AURORA | School nurses hear a lot, but the casual cynicism a young girl handed Clyde Miller nurse Hannah Green one day caught her off guard and prompted her to do something about a surge in kids vaping.
Last year, a fifth grader at the APS K-8 school was referred to her after being discovered with a vape pen. Talking to kids about smoking and vaping often falls to the school nurse.
The student had to put together a presentation about vaping, and one of the slides was about why she decided to vape. Green was distressed by her answer.
“She said she just wanted to not feel anything, and that we all die anyways, so it’s OK, and that really hit me,” Green said. She wasn’t very familiar with e-cigarettes, but did more research over the summer and decided to put together a curriculum for the school’s eighth grader’s using the American Lung Association’s “Not on Tobacco” program, which is designed to prevent young people from smoking or vaping.
Portrait by PHILIP B. POSTON/Sentinel Colorado.
According to the ALA, more than 95% of people who use tobacco products started using before the age of 21. Nick Torres, the ALA’s advocacy director for Colorado, said that Not on Tobacco has been around for decades but that in recent years its curriculum has been updated to include information about e-cigarettes.
“It’s really bad for kids because their brains aren’t developed and neither are their lungs,” Green said.
Torres said that vaping is particularly concerning because the Food and Drug Administration does not regulate how e-cigarettes are manufactured or marketed, which makes it hard to know what exactly people who use them are ingesting.
“Kids picked up the products not knowing what they were getting themselves into,” he said.
It’s unclear exactly how many young people vape, but a 2019 survey of 100,000 Colorado students found that 27% of high schoolers said they had smoked an electronic cigarette in the past 30 days.
Green created a 10-module program using the curriculum and one Friday a month went into all the eighth-grade classrooms to present it to students. She included discussion about why vaping is dangerous and what students can do if their peers try to encourage them to vape. Teachers and students were both very receptive to the program, she said.
“I don’t think kids realize how bad it is for them,” Green said. In some cases, students told her they were introduced to vaping because their older siblings or their parents vaped. Many of them said that they started vaping out of curiosity.
“A lot of them didn’t really realize how similar it was to smoking a cigarette,” she said. After going through her program, more of them understand the risks it poses and she said some of them have even encouraged their family members to quit vaping.
Torres heard about Green’s work and reached out to ask if she would be interested in testifying in support of the bill to ban flavored tobacco products that was being considered in the state legislature. Green spoke virtually before a committee in support of the bill.
“A person that is trying to quit smoking and using vape doesn’t need cotton candy flavored vape,” she told The Sentinel. “That’s targeting kids.”
She also had some of her students write letters to legislators about their own experiences with vaping. One student wrote that her brother started vaping because he liked the flavored products. Now, he and her mom argue all the time.
Another student asked legislators to pass the bill because his brother and stepdad smoke and he is afraid they will get lung cancer.
The bill ultimately failed to pass, but Torres said that he is confident it will come up again in a future legislative session.
In the meantime, Green plans to expand her program during the next school year. She hopes to get a few more staff members involved, and wants to include younger grade levels, students as young as fourth and fifth grade have been referred to her office for vaping.
“I definitely need to start sooner,” she said.
Nicotine is more addictive and arguably more destructive than heroin, yet it is largely unregulated while heroin is on the federal schedule 1 drug list and we spend billions on the DEA trying to stop it from being sold.
Nicotine needs to be added to that list and a good portion of the DEA’s budget redirected to programs to wean people off their addiction.
While I get the point you are trying to make, Terry, I can tell that heroin addiction has not directly been a part of your or your family’s life. That would make you very lucky.