Addiction
https://insight.livestories.com/s/v2/what-is-vaping/4c9af340-3b63-4b89-9927-b722ccd8684b
This weeks post is a little different. I looked at the NDAFW's activities to help educate students on substance abuse. Unfortunately there was no clear lesson plan and was more of an outline on how to properly educate students in grades 6 through 12 on different substances and the effects it can have on your body. For the most part the NDAFW wants the students to be able to complete these goals by the end of the lesson "Analyzing and interpreting information, data, and/or evidence, Collaboration, Creativity, Critical thinking, Giving a presentation, Reading comprehension, Writing" (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2020). In our lessons on substance abuse it's our goal to educate our students as to why they should not part take in certain substances and allow them to be able to us what they learn by using the skills listed above.
Since this was more of an overview on all substance abuse topics I wanted to take a closer look at vaping. As someone that is a part of the vaping community I feel like my knowledge on vaping and specific devices can help educate a lot more people and help everyone get a better understanding of vaping culture. The vapes that started giving vaping a bad name was Juul. Jull uses a disposable pod system where the pods come prefilled with e-liquid. You have no control over what flavors and ingredients are in this pod. Juul has 2 different types of nicotine strength 3% and 5%. These percentages means there is either 30 or 50 milligrams of nicotine in each individual pod. The same thing goes for disposable devices such as Puff Bars/ "Almost all vaping devices, including Juul products and Puff Bars, contain
nicotine." (Scholastic and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2020). This statement is false. The vaping community does not recognize disposables and Juuls as vapes but more of a nicotine device system that you can not regulate and have control over. In the vaping community we are more focused on building our own coils as well as choosing our desired nicotine strengths. You can decide to put e-juice in your device that contains no nicotine. The point of vaping is to be able to quit smoking or just use it to break another addiction. When it comes to devices with refillable systems you have to use the correct juice that works not only with your coil but your system as well. When it comes to Juuls and disposable devices they come at a preset wattage and you are unable to change the juice. Once your pod has no more juice or the battery dies or the device itself has no more juice you have to throw it away and buy a new one for $20 or more. Devices like these are the ones that everyone is worried about and unfortunately a lot of people generalize all vapes under this category. If you buy a single use device or pods they do not tell you the ingredients that you are vaping. On the other hand every single bottle of e-juice, or vape juice, lists all of the ingredients not only on the box that it comes in but on the label as well. There is a lot more to the vaping community than these articles cover.
How are we supposed to educate our students on vaping if we do not even have all of the information? Is the concern mostly on the students using nicotine or is it about the levels of nicotine or is it about the harmful ingredients in the devices that they are using? We can not generalize all vapes under the same category. Personally I vape flavors that a lot of students will not have heard of before because they only have access to the disposable devices. I have used juices where the flavors are called unicorn milk and hulk tears. You do not see any of these flavors in the devices that minors are getting their hands on. What they vape, no matter the brand they choose, it will always be a fruity flavor and the name of the flavor will always be the name of the fruit thus there is a higher chance of a disposable being from a fake company as opposed to the brand they think they are buying. 
https://nida.nih.gov/themes/custom/solstice/interactive/vaping/
How are we supposed to educate our students if the information we are giving them is false? You can not classify every vaping device. Everyone has started vaping for their own reasons and yet us as a society decided that it's okay to group every type of vape into the same category. "The liquid inside most vaping devices, including Juul products and Puff Bars, contains nicotine" (Scholastic and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2020). Most vaping devices do not come with any kind of liquid in the pod or the system ready to smoke once you take it out of the box. Real vapers will tell you the kind of juice they enjoy and can probably show you a collection of juices that they have and can use in their systems. You can buy all of the different pod systems and mods and devices like that and not receive a single drop of e-liquid to use in the device. On the other hand as Marijuana is becoming legal in more and more states you are able to vape THC. To anyone that is not familiar with vaping either THC or nicotine it is very possible to confuse the 2 since both devices while they are different look extremely similar to one another. Even though you can purchase a THC vape such as a cartridge you are still vaporizing the oil and producing the same clouds as you would with a nicotine vape.
I do agree that we should educate our students as to why they should not vape but at the same time we need to have all of our facts straight before we can do that. By make generalizations like the ones that I have mentioned will not help us properly educate our students. This is more about using scare tactics to help scare our students straight into not vaping. Making generalizations will not help anything once students realize that there are devices out there that do not come with any kind of vape juice. There is a youtube video called How Smoking vs Vaping Affects Your Lungs. Even though this is not a scientific experiment it does break the idea that vaping causes your lungs to turn black. In this video you can see that after a month of vaping from a device I was talking about the lungs in this case were much clearer than smoking cigarettes during that month. You can not use that fear anymore because students today are able to search up a video online that proves the opposite of what we would teach them in school. Overall, we need to educate our students and follow the NDAFW's recommendations on what to include in our lesson but we have to be able to provide our students with the correct information as well as education them for the purpose of education and not fear mongering.
References
National Institute on Drug Abuse, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2020, November 30). NDAFW activity ideas: Community, school-wide, and online. National Institutes of Health. Retrieved April 2, 2023, from https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/parents-educators/lesson-plans/ndafw-activities-ideas-community-school-wide-online Notap, Chris. YouTube. (2019, March 14). How smoking vs vaping affects your lungs ● you must see this ! ! YouTube. Retrieved April 2, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pwj6BuS8Ds
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