Youth Leaders at La Clinica de la Raza's Peer Educator Program: Social Media is Powerful Against Teen Nicotine Addiction

Opinion Editorial by Alexandra Winston, Alameda County Public Health Department Tobacco Control Program

Oakland, CA: Recently social media sites have been flooded with memes making fun of e-cigs and vaporizers. Pictures depicting people with giant over-sized vaporizers (large e-cigarette like devices) with captions, “We get it dude, you vape” or “start vaping they said, you’ll save money they said…” implying how expensive it is to maintain the devices and purchase refills for them. Youth Leaders at La Clinica de la Raza’s Peer Educator Program say, that last year there were lots of people vaping in class, but this year hardly anybody is. The Youth Leaders discussed among themselves how social media campaigns have made it “nerdy” or “dorky” to use the popular devices. They did say however, that flavored tobacco products like little cigars and cigarillos are still popular among teens in the San Antonio neighborhood of East Oakland. The Youth Leaders all agreed that social media may be a key into making smoking any kind of tobacco product a form of social status suicide. “If you make it unpopular to smoke through different kinds of social media, maybe some people wouldn’t start doing it,” was one of the Youth Leaders’ responses to a question about getting teens to never start using tobacco.

According to the CDC e-cigarette use among middle and high school students tripled between 2013 and 2014. The impact of social media making fun of the industry remains to be seen in more recent studies. However, with youth friendly and attractive packaging that resembles all of the popular candy and soda brands like, Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, Gummy Bears, and Mountain Dew, e-cigarettes and their liquid, known as “e-juice” are still posing a threat to young people developing a lifelong addiction to nicotine. One of the Youth Leaders at La Clinica shared, “My friend started smoking young and then started to use other drugs. He had to go to John George Center (a psychiatric hospital) for his problems. His mom would visit him and he was always trying to get out to smoke.” The stranglehold of addiction is not just left to what most people would think of as “hard core” drug users. Nicotine addiction can be a lifelong struggle, and can be more deadly than any other drug in the world. Smoking still remains the number one cause of preventable death in the United States with an average of 480,000 deaths per year, 40,000 (8.3%) of them being Californians.

The Youth Leaders at La Clinica also expressed concern about the lack of public education surrounding nicotine addiction and the dangers of nicotine poisoning. Examples of what they thought should be publicized included, warnings about liquid nicotine in e-juice, especially how it can absorbed through your skin if spilled, can cause nicotine poisoning, symptoms of nicotine poisoning, and how vapor/e-cigarette products that contain nicotine can still be highly addictive. Perhaps, social media is the best way to communicate these messages to teens. Peer educators at La Clinica will soon start a social media campaign that will start covering these issues next month.