KID STUFF: Aurora teens ask city to step in and snuff student vape use

AURORA | A growing chorus of Aurora teenagers has become a regular presence at city council meetings, all carrying the same message that youth vaping is quietly harming their generation, and the city needs to take action.

“Let all reunite for a better future,” 15-year-old Sarah Padilla Zepeda told the Sentinel, while pointing out that it closely follows the name of their youth coalition. 

They call themselves United for Better Futures, a branch of the long-standing Aurora Partners for Thriving Youth coalition. The students say they’ve watched vaping move from a curiosity to a crisis, spreading through middle school hallways, bathrooms, lunch tables, parks and increasingly younger grades.

The message counters national stories showing that while vaping among juveniles is still a problem, it has become less prevalent.

“Vaping is hitting third graders,” Padilla Zepeda said. “They’re around nine, and even my little brother is asking me what’s going on. He just doesn’t know, and I want to lead him to the right path. I also want to lead people who aren’t just family. I want to change their lives instead of letting them go down the wrong path.”

For months, the group has been speaking during Public Invited to be Heard at city council meetings to urge city council to adopt a tobacco retail ordinance that would tighten licensing and compliance inspections, especially for stores selling to minors or offering unregulated psychoactive products, according to Haley Foster, Aurora Partners for Thriving Youth coalition director.

“We can do way better for our community,” 14-year-old Novella Miller said.

In Aurora, tobacco retailers outnumber grocery stores two-to-one, according to Adams and Arapahoe Retail Food License Data. Stores located within 1,500 feet of a school are twice as likely to sell to minors, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue, Tobacco Compliance Check. 

One in four Aurora Public School students gets tobacco products directly from a retailer, according to the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, and 85% of Aurora Public Schools students who tried to buy nicotine products were not refused.

“This has steadily gone up since 2019,” Foster said. “The coalition came together, did a lot of research, and decided that we needed to have some higher restrictions on kids getting access to substances and nicotine.”

Neighborhoods with clusters of tobacco shops and similar outlets experience increased crime and higher youth access, according to a 2018 study called ‘The geography of crime and violence surrounding tobacco shops, medical marijuana dispensaries, and off-sale alcohol outlets in a large, urban low-income community of color.’

“It is definitely a lot of peer pressure for people,” Padilla Zepeda said. “It could cost you a friendship if you don’t follow along with them. So it could be a lot of consequences if you don’t, and if you do, and it’s a lot of pressure, I feel like, for somebody who could only be 12 years old.”

Foster said the legal solution the youth coalition is pushing would raise compliance checks for tobacco retailers and “make sure someone is actually checking all the psychoactive products being sold in vape shops.”

“We’ve had more than one death linked to vape-access in Aurora,” she said. “Kids trying to buy this stuff, or sell it. It’s dangerous.”

This death refers to Jor’dell Richardson, a 14-year-old, who was shot and killed by Aurora Police after an armed robbery, June 2023, where police said he was attempting to steal vapes from a convenience store. 

Many of the teens asking the city to intervene joined substance-prevention classes at North and East Middle Schools and eventually joined the coalition. They now run tabling events at community gatherings, where they use games and conversation to educate their peers.

“During our tabling events, sometimes we’ll have a spinning wheel, and when people come up to the table, we make them spin the wheel,” 14-year-old Geovani Arellano-Morales said. 

When people land on a number, they are asked questions about smoking or vaping risks, and if they answer well, they receive a prize and are told about the coalition, Arellano-Morales said. 

But the students say their work is about more than warnings, it’s about offering alternatives.

“We show ways to relieve stress other than smoking,” Arellano-Morales said. 

He listed deep breathing, listening to music and exercise.

“A lot of times, people start smoking because of stress or anger or other problems,” 14-year-old Vladimir Sandoval Guriano said. “So we try to fix that, and find other things they can do without them smoking like fidget toys.”

Arellano-Morales said he had a family member who changed a lot from smoking, and that it encouraged him to join the coalition.  

“I saw him get addicted to it at an early age,” Arellano-Morales said. “I saw him go from a really kind person to somebody who was just angry and yelling all the time, and when I found out about this coalition, and I saw that I could help other people going through the same thing, it just made me really want to put myself out there and be able to prevent this from happening to other people.”

He said he also knew a girl who was full of life and liked to try new things. She wanted to try it once, and since it was so easy to get, she did, and it took her life down a completely different path than what she had planned from a young age. “It gets to kids younger and younger,” he said.

“I just don’t want to see that happen to any more kids, because that was a sixth grader, and it’s just getting to the kids younger and younger as time goes by,” Arellano-Morales said.

Miller said pressure within families can fracture relationships. She said she’s dealt with the pain of losing loved ones to peer pressure herself. Padilla Zepeda said she’s watched younger kids mimic vaping with Smarties candy, and it starts as a joke, but then it normalizes the habit. She said she read about a two-year-old who was taken to the hospital for vape poisoning. 

“I don’t want Aurora to ever reach that level,” Padilla Zepeda said.

The teens said the stakes feel urgent. They believe stricter rules could have changed the paths of people they loved. They want Aurora to take the steps needed to change the paths of those who come after them.

— Cassandra Ballard, Sentinel Colorado

Once seen as a ‘healthy’ alternative to smoking, vaping carries dangers, experts say

Sixty years ago, the U.S. surgeon general released a report that settled a longstanding public debate about the dangers of cigarettes and led to huge changes in smoking in America.

Today, some public health experts say a similar report could help clear the air about vaping.

Many U.S. adults believe nicotine vaping is as harmful as — or more dangerous than — cigarette smoking. That’s wrong. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and most scientists agree that, based on available evidence, electronic cigarettes are far less dangerous than traditional cigarettes.

But that doesn’t mean e-cigarettes are harmless either. And public health experts disagree about exactly how harmful, or helpful, the devices are. Clarifying information is urgently needed, said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University.

“There have been so many confusing messages about vaping,” Gostin said. “A surgeon general’s report could clear that all up.”

One major obstacle: E-cigarettes haven’t been around long enough for scientists to see if vapers develop problems like lung cancer and heart disease.

“There’s a remarkable lack of evidence,” said Dr. Kelly Henning, who leads the public health program at Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Cigarette smoking has long been described as the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the annual toll at 480,000 lives. That count should start to fall around 2030, according to a study published last year by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, thanks in part to a decline in smoking rates that began in the 1960s.

Back then, ashtrays were everywhere and more than 42% of U.S. adults smoked.

On Jan. 11, 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry released an authoritative report that said smoking causes illness and death — and the government should do something about it. The report is considered a watershed moment: In the decades that followed, warning labels were put on cigarette packs, cigarette commercials were banned, governments raised tobacco taxes and new restrictions were placed on where people could light up.

By 2022, the adult smoking rate was 11%.

Some experts believe e-cigarettes deserve some of the credit. The devices were billed as a way to help smokers quit, and the FDA has authorized a handful of e-cigarettes as less-harmful alternatives for adult smokers.

Vaping’s popularity exploded in the 2010s, among both adults but and teens. In 2014, e-cigarettes surpassed combustible cigarettes as the tobacco product that youth used the most. By 2019, 28% of high schoolers were vaping.

U.S. health officials sounded alarms, fearing that kids hooked on nicotine would rediscover cigarettes. That hasn’t happened. Last year, the high school smoking rate was less than 2% — far lower than the 35% rate seen about 25 years ago.

“That’s a great public health triumph. It’s an almost unbelievable one,” said Kenneth Warner, who studies tobacco-control policies at the University of Michigan.

“If it weren’t for e-cigarettes, I think we would be hearing the public health community shouting at the top of their lungs about the success of getting kids not to smoke,” he said.

Cigarettes have been called the deadliest consumer product ever invented. Their smoke contains thousands of chemicals, at least 69 of which can cause cancer.

The vapor from e-cigarettes has been estimated to contain far fewer chemicals, and fewer carcinogens. Some toxic substances are present in both, but show up in much lower concentrations in e-cigarette vapor than in cigarette smoke.

Studies have shown that smokers who completely switch to vaping have better lung function and see other health improvements.

“I would much rather see someone vaping than smoking a Marlboro. There is no question in my mind that vaping is safer,” said Donald Shopland, who was a clerk for the committee that generated the 1964 report and is co-author of a forthcoming book on it.

But what about the dangers to people who have never smoked?

There have been 100 to 200 studies looking at vaping, and they are a mixed bag, said Dr. Neal Benowitz, of the University of California, San Francisco, a leading academic voice on nicotine and tobacco addiction. The studies used varying techniques, and many were limited in their ability to separate the effects of vaping from former cigarettes smoking, he said.

“If you look at the research, it’s all over the map,” Warner said.

Studies have detected bronchitis symptoms and aggravation of asthma in young people who vape. Research also indicates vaping also can affect the cells that line the blood vessels and heart, leading to looks for a link to heart disease. Perhaps the most cited concern is nicotine, the stimulant that makes cigarettes and vapes addictive.

Animal studies suggest nicotine exposure in adolescents can affect development of the area of the brain responsible for attention, learning and impulse control. Some research in people suggests a link between vaping and ADHD symptoms, depression and feelings of stress. But experts say that the research is very limited and more work needs to be done.

Meanwhile, there’s not even a clear scientific consensus that vaping is an effective way to quit smoking, with different studies coming up with different conclusions.

In 2016, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said efforts were needed to prevent and reduce e-cigarette use by children and young adults, saying nicotine in any form is unsafe for kids.

About four months before the report’s release, the FDA began taking steps to regulate e-cigarettes, believing they would benefit smokers.

The agency has authorized several e-cigarettes, but it has refused more than 1 million product marketing applications. Critics say the FDA has been unfair and inconsistent in regulation of products.

Meanwhile, the number of different e-cigarette devices sold in the U.S. has boomed, due largely to disposables imported from China that come in fruit and candy flavors. But vaping by youths has recently been falling: Last year, 10% of high school students surveyed said they had used e-cigarettes in the previous month, down from 14% the year before.

— The Associated Press