Vaping Up 75% Among High School Students This Year, Federal Data Indicate

The Wall Street Journal (9/20, McKay, Maloney, Subscription Publication, 6.61M) reports the prevalence of vaping in the past 30 days among US high school students has increased by about 75 percent compared to 2017, according to a person who has seen new preliminary federal data. The Journal references FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s recent comments that youth vaping has become an epidemic, and also shares findings from its own survey of teen vaping, which showed that almost a third of 1,722 participants, ages 13 to 18, said they were current vapers.

Research indicates 4.5% of adults vape. The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal (9/20, Craver, 167K) reports a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that almost 11 million US adults use e-cigarettes and around 15 percent of them began vaping without first being smokers. The statistics mean around 4.5 percent of adults are current users of e-cigarettes. The article mentions, “In 2016, the National Institutes of Health reported there were 7.75 million adult vapers, of which 51.7 percent were current smokers, 34.8 percent were former smokers and 13.5 percent were people who had never smoked.”