Reports of death from vaping related illness have been on the rise. About twelve deaths and 805 illness have been reported in the United States, and one man in Quebec was found to have the first vaping related illness in Canada. A teenager from London, Ont. was also placed on life-support after using a vaping device.
Smoking cigarettes has a well documented history of causing health problems, such as lung cancer, and respiratory diseases. But there isn’t the same level of knowledge about vaping, and recent news about illnesses and deaths have raised concerns about the health effects of vaping.
“These products will likely be at least 95 per cent less hazardous [than cigarettes] just based on what we know,” said David Sweanor, a Canadian lawyer and professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on public health. “Cigarettes are just so incredibly deadly,” he added.
Approximately half of Canadians smoked in 1965, compared to just 15.1 per cent in 2017 according to a report published by the University of Waterloo on the use of tobacco in Canada. The report also showed that only 7.9 per cent of young people between 15 to19 were current smokers in 2017 compared to about 28 per cent in 1999.
This reduction in smoking is partly due to the introduction of vaping. Just as cigarettes once did, vaping is booming in popularity.
“When I got involved in the early-80s, 42 per cent of 15 to 19-year-olds in Canada were daily cigarette smokers. It’s now vanishing really in part because vaping has made cigarettes an incredibly uncool thing for anybody to do,” Sweanor said.
Vaping was marketed as a solution for smokers looking to quit, but it has attracted a lot of young people because of its status. One example of this is from JUUL, a vaping product so popular amongst youth that the previous CEO Kevin Burns, went on to issue a warning to non-smokers about using their products.
“Don’t vape. Don’t use JUUL,” he said in an August 2019 interview, in which he elaborated on how the long-term effects of vaping remain unknown, and that non-smokers are not the target demographic. “Don’t start using nicotine if you don’t have a preexisting relationship with nicotine.”
“Vaping has made cigarettes an incredibly uncool thing for anybody to do.”
– David Sweanor, U Ottawa law professor who focuses on public health
Daniel Cormier, 21, has been working at SmokeFX, a local vape shop, for over a year. Most of the people who enter the shop for vape products are adults, “30 years or older,” he said. “Definitely the majority of our customer base used to smoke before, and are looking for a healthier alternative.”
Risks and Regulations
A study published by Public Health England in 2015 showed that vaping is estimated to be 95 per cent less harmful than smoking and that “e-cigarettes carry a fraction of the risk of smoking.”
“Everything has risks. What we do is try to reduce those risks as much as we can. We have to compare any activity to the alternative,” he added.
“To anybody who doesn’t use nicotine at all, vaping is a bad idea because there is still a small amount of risk.”
Cormier estimates that “60 per cent of people [who walk into SmokeFX] don’t have a clue about vaping.” Usually, he is the one asking questions to find a product suitable for them.
“I’ll ask ‘how many cigarettes do you smoke a day?’, and if they don’t, I usually try to convince them to get a no-nicotine product, but it usually doesn’t work out,” he said. “So if they’re heavy, heavy smokers, what will work better is a smaller device that works like a cigarette, and they can interact with it like a cigarette.”
“To anybody who doesn’t use nicotine at all, vaping is a bad idea because there is still a small amount of risk.” – David Sweanor
The risks of using vapes are still unknown as long-term studies on the effect of vaping have not been done yet, but with new cases of vaping related illnesses in the United States and Canada, fears are rising that vaping may not be as safe as once thought and governments are being called upon to regulate or completely ban vaping devices.
According to Sweanor, there has been a history of government regulation giving a marketplace less harmful products. In this case, vaping as opposed to cigarettes.
“We’ve seen an awful lot of that and there is a tendency to think, ‘oh yes, we have less hazardous goods and services and we migrate to them,” he said. “There is no guarantee that we will go in what I will consider a pragmatic rational direction.”
“That gets to the nature of policy formation. Who’s involved?” he added. “What are the various things that governments have to take into account? What are the pressure points? Who are the politicians and what is their base? Who are the people they are trying to appeal to?”
Vaping and Teens
From 2016 to 2017, 12.6 per cent of students from Grade 7 to 9 reported using an e-cigarette according to the report from the University of Waterloo. Data on e-cigarettes began to be collected only in 2014. One-in-eight student non-smokers had tried an e-cigarette, while four-in-five smokers had tried an e-cigarette. Of students who smoked both an e-cigarette and tobacco, 44 per cent said they tried the e-cigarette first.
“I remember back in high school, there were only a handful of people smoking cigarettes and standing at the smoking section,” said Rachel Capron, a fourth-year psychology and biology student at Carleton. “Nobody was using vapes yet, and hardly anyone was smoking, I think we were on the back end of a dying trend.”
Most of the young people who come into his store are “just chasing the headrush and don’t understand that they’re going to get hopelessly addicted to it,” said Cormier.
Another study published in the British Medical Journal based on online surveys of 16 to 19 year-olds showed that between 2017 and 2018, the number of Canadian teens who said they vaped within the past month increased by 73.8 per cent from 8.4 in 2017 to 14.6 in 2018. There was also a 26.2 per cent increase in the number of teenagers who had ever vaped from 29.3 per cent in 2017 to 37 per cent in 2018.
“Those people we see vaping today likely would never have gotten into smoking anyways,” Capron said. “I can’t imagine that those teens who are so excited about different flavours and blowing clouds would be the ones buying packs [of cigarettes] at a gas station.”
In Canada’s Vaping and Tobacco Products Act, there are strict rules put in place to regulate the use of vapes. Buyers must be 19 years of age, and the advertisement of vape products is heavily regulated by Health Canada.
Measures are being taken to dissuade the use of vaping too, with more and more smoke-free areas adopting vape-free rules too. This was especially effective following the 2017 Smoke-Free Ontario Act, which forbade vaping in enclosed workplaces.
For Sweanor, the key to mitigating risk is to make less addictive products.
“We don’t need to make judgements about why people behave the way they do. But we can do things to say that if you are going to be [partaking in dangerous activities] here’s what we can recommend, here’s what we can facilitate to reduce the risk,” he said.
“So if we want to encourage innovation to deliver better public health, we need to facilitate the ongoing R&D [research and development] to come out with ever less hazardous, ever less addictive products.”
Feature image by Nicole Quigley.
