Not condoning is not enough

Apr 4, 2018 | Journalism, Social Issues | 0 comments

In Katie Zernike’s April 2 New York Times story “‘I Can’t Stop’: Schools Struggle With Vaping Explosion,” Ashley Gould, the chief administrative officer of Juul, offers the following quote: “We do not want kids using our products. Our product is not only not for kids, it’s not for non-nicotine users.” At the start of this school year, I did not know what a vaping device looked like. It’s likely that I, like many teachers, was fooled by a student clutching a device that looked either like a flash drive or phone charger. It’s possible that he may have been using his computer to charge said device. I wasn’t the only one who was fooled. “Two months ago, if a teacher smelled cotton candy they wouldn’t have thought of anything about it, but now, they go into the bathrooms thinking it could be a kid hitting a Juul,” an administrator told the news publication I currently advise. It was student journalism that taught me what to look for, and many of the reasons I should be concerned. I learned that 65% of high school students at my school had used a vaping device, and that the FDA does not yet know whether e-cigarettes are safe for their intended use. In honest conversations with my students, I learned that they worry about their peers, and themselves. The information left me feeling a strange mix of shock at history repeating itself, and concern about my students being tricked by peer pressure and marketing into risky behaviors they will regret. Via the Times article:
E-cigarettes are widely considered safer than traditional cigarettes, but they are too new for researchers to understand the long-term health effects, making today’s youth what public health experts call a “guinea pig generation.”
When students learn to identify what is newsworthy in their community and report on these topics ethically, we certainly can learn a lot. The “guinea pig generation”—empowered by research tools that GenXers could have only dreamed about as teens—knows an awful lot about the issues that impact them most. I’d argue that educators must take that time to learn, support, and respond. Vaping is only one bullet point on a long list of those topics. (Lately, for some sad reasons, the world outside high school doors seems to be paying more attention.) In an exchange on Twitter today, JUUL suggested that I visit their website to learn about all of the ways they “do not condone the use of JUUL by minors.”
It was probably a scripted response [NOTE: @JUULVapor tweeted back to let me know their response was not scripted], but I did what their tweet suggested. What I learned at the briefing on JUUL’s site: they are making “significant investments in product development to innovate features aimed at preventing the use of our products by anyone underage,” using “industry-leading ID match and age verification technology” to make it harder for youth to purchase devices on their official website, and “working on new approaches to address the issue more effectively.” I didn’t read much about these goals or investments in the New York Times story—or in student journalism. Meanwhile, while JUUL patiently seeks “the opportunity to work with lawmakers, regulators and advocacy groups in pursuit of restricting our product to its intended users,” pediatricians have found increased levels of five carcinogenic compounds in the urine of teenagers who vape. In case those researchers in San Francisco labs would like to understand how widespread a behavior they do not condone has become, here’s a primer list of some ways high school journalists have covered vaping recently. The list below is compiled from Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s 2018 Crown Awards and from National Scholastic Press Association’s 2018 Pacemaker Finalists —so it’s not a complete list, but a representative sampling of some of the best publications in the country. Here’s hoping that this list provides some understanding of the extent of the problem from the sharp, capable perspectives of the people closest to it. I condone some reading.

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