Vaping among America’s teenagers continues to climb, while the use of other substances — such as alcohol and opioids — has declined in recent years, according to a new report.
Monday’s report, called Monitoring the Future, comes from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and is based on an annual survey of drug and alcohol use and attitudes among eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders in the United States. This year’s survey included 44,482 students from 392 public and private schools across the country.
Behind drinking alcohol, vaping was the second-most common form of substance use, the study showed, with 17.6% of eighth-graders, 32.3% of 10th-graders and 37.3% of 12th-graders reporting vaping in the past year. Last year, the annual survey found that prevalence of vaping was 13.3% among eighth-graders, 23.9% among 10th-graders and 27.8% among 12th-graders.
Vaping involves using an electronic cigarette, hookah or similar device to inhale certain vapors or aerosols, which could contain substances such as nicotine, marijuana or flavoring.
“What we are seeing is a change in the patterns of drug taking among teenagers in that they are the lowest that we’ve seen for many years,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the report.
“So we have very good news,” she said, “but at the same time, we have to be vigilant, because of this very high uptake and embracing of vaping by teenagers that could lead them then to the administration of other drugs.”
Vaping: ‘A real problem’
This year is the second in which the Monitoring the Future survey asked high schoolers about vaping specific substances: nicotine, marijuana or “just flavoring.”
Flavoring was the most commonly reported substance among eighth-graders at 15.1%, followed by nicotine at 10.9% and then marijuana at 4.4%.
Tenth-graders reported identical rates for flavoring and nicotine, but 12.4% reported vaping marijuana. Among 12th-graders, 29.7% reported vaping nicotine, 25.7% flavoring and 13.1% marijuana.
“You’re seeing right now that 30% of 12th-graders last year were exposed to nicotine,” Volkow said.
“Another issue of concern is, these devices are very efficient at delivering drugs rapidly into your brain and, in so doing, deliver the drugs in ways that make them more addictive — and so it’s not just nicotine. Now we also know that they are using it for 9THC,” or tetrahydrocannabinol, a cannabinoid chemical in marijuana, she said.
Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, a professor of pediatrics in Stanford University’s Division of Adolescent Medicine, called this increase in vaping alarming but not surprising because of new products, such as those from popular e-cigarette maker Juul.
“However, since MTF doesn’t appear to separate out vaping vs. Juuling in their survey, it is hard to know what the youth are using,” Halpern-Felsher said of the new report.
“The overall decline or stabilization of other drug use is promising, although the increase in vaping marijuana is concerning,” she said. “Clearly, youth drug prevention messages needs to go beyond conventional drugs and include all forms of nicotine and vaping.”
The overall increase in vaping in the survey appears to be consistent with data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing a 78% increase in youth vaping between 2017 and 2018, said Dr. Pamela Ling, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who works with the school’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and was not involved with the new report.