Nashua Students Open Up On Dangers Of High School Vaping Culture

NASHUA, NH — When a panel of 16 Nashua South and Nashua North students were asked how many of them smoked cigarettes during a roundtable discussion with U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen Monday morning no one raise a hand — many of the students grimacing in disgust. When the same panel was asked how many of them had tried e-cigarettes — or vaping — nearly all of them slowly and sheepishly put a palm in the air.

With growing concern over the long-term health effects of vaping, Shaheen has introduced the E-Cigarette Youth Protection Act that would force e-cigarette companies to help fund federal prevention efforts and regulatory enforcement in youth vaping. On Monday, she held the roundtable at Nashua South to learn more about the epidemic among high school students and talk about ways to curb it.

"As high school students your brains are still developing," Shaheen told the group. "What vaping does is send a huge dose of nicotine to young people's brains in a way that has some real impact. We're still trying to figure out what the long-term health impacts are. But they are significant."

Last week, The Trump Administration announced it was seeking a ban on flavored e-cigarettes following the six recent deaths believed directly related to vaping.

"When this first came to our attention, I'll be honest that we didn't know what vaping was," Nashua South principal Keith Richard said. "We saw these devices and were like: 'What is this?' When I had conversations with kids about it, a lot of it was about the flavors. It was amazing how many flavors there were."

Richard added that many of the teachers he talked with within the past two years thought the students who were using them in school were carrying USB devices for their computers. Yet, while adults may have been slow to come around to the growing epidemic, the students said they were immersed in it early.

"Coming into freshman year a lot of people were already doing it," Nashua South senior Jenna Chiavelli said. "It was fitting in and being part of the social group. As we grew older, and all these health cases started to take a toll on these high school students' bodies, and it's on the news, in our newspaper and around us, I think that's when most people are taking a step back and realizing what it can do to you."

Chiavelli, who plays on the field hockey team, said she's seen her classmates starting to turn away from the devices — which are prohibited on school grounds — as health concerns grow, but Nashua South junior Haleigh Swabowicz said for some students who have been using the devices for years it is not as easy as simply deciding not to vape.

"We're at the point where they started it just for fun," said Swabowicz, a member of Students Against Destructive Decisions at Nashua South. "Then now they can't put it down anymore. They are going to the bathroom during school (to do it) constantly. Some of them are going at least once every block. They're addicted. They know it's banned, but they're at that point where they can't do without it."

According to the Centers for Disease Control, e-cigarette uses among high schoolers grew from around one percent in 2011 to 20.8 percent in 2018 — an increase of 1,300 percent.

Several students said that e-cigarettes are used as ways to deal with the stress of school, college applications or anxiety issues from depression.

"I do know a lot of kids who go through that turn to (vaping) as something they can turn to as opposed to someone," Chiavelli said. "They don't know who they can talk to, when they can talk to them, if they would take a good approach. They find their own coping method for themselves."

Swabowicz said vaping is so prevalent among high school students that she could go to almost anyone she knows at the school and they could get her an e-cigarette device even though it is illegal in New Hampshire to sell them to those under 18 years old.

She added that the addictive nature of vaping requires an approach to curbing the epidemic that is more supportive than punitive.

"When kids get caught, they get suspended," she said. "But it's an out-of-school suspension so they go home. They go to that place where they can do it and nobody is watching them. One thing that I think is really important is having an in-school suspension. Then they stay in school, stay in the classroom and can get educated on it. We need to get rid of this negative connotation about it where they are embarrassed to come forward."