NEWS PHOTO JEREMY APPEL
Michelle Sauve, an Alberta Health Service tobacco reduction counsellor, and Const. Darryl Hubrich, the school resource officer at Hat High, are letting parents know about the dangers of youth vaping.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
Alberta Health Service and the Medicine Hat police are teaming up to let youth and their parents know that vaping isn’t a healthy alternative to smoking.
“What we want the public to know is that it may be considered less harmful, but it doesn’t mean it’s harmless,” said Michelle Sauve, a tobacco reduction counsellor with AHS.
Although vapour may have less than the 7,000 toxic chemicals found in cigarettes, it isn’t by any stretch chemical-free, she said.
Nicotine itself – regardless of how it’s ingested – will have negative effects on a developing brain, which applies to anyone under the age of 25.
Sauve says young people are particularly at risk for getting addicted to nicotine and moving from vaping to smoking cigarettes, which tend to be more accessible.
She said Canada has fought hard to reduce smoking rates to 13 per cent in 2015, but just two years later, that rate increased to 17 per cent. In Alberta, the rate grew to 18.9 per cent in 2017 from 15 per cent in 2015.
Sauve says the popularity of vaping, which arrived in Canada just a decade ago, could be one factor.
“A concern is we do not know enough about this product,” she said. “What will those long-term impacts be decades to come with electronic cigarettes that we don’t know yet?”
Another challenge is that the e-cigarette industry is marketing its product towards youth, with a wide variety of flavours on offer.
“The industry is actually manipulating young people,” Sauve said.
The companies do this through gearing its advertising to youth on social media.
“They’re made to look fun and novel,” Sauve said, likening it to how smoking was made to appear stylish in the ’60s and ’70s.
She says e-cigarette companies have the ability to apply for a grant from Health Canada as a smoking cessation aid, but none have done so.
“I have no idea why they would not if the intention of the product was to help people quit smoking,” said Sauve.
Community Safety Unit Const. Darryl Hubich – the school resource officer at Medicine Hat High School – says he’s seen first hand the increase in vaping among high school students.
He estimates somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent of students he’s seen use nicotine do so through vaping, rather than smoking, making it a pressing concern as a matter of public health.
“They’re using it, not just daily, they’re using it every break in class, every chance they go to the washroom. You can see the turn in some of the students that are using it,” said Hubich.
Medicine Hat Public School Division’s policy on vaping treats it the same as smoking, which he says is a step in the right direction.
“If the school boards and officers in the schools get together and come up with a strategy that we’re all on board for, following the same rules, it makes it easier for everyone. And the students too, because they know how we’re going to deal with it.”
