Vaping Rampant Among Middle Schoolers In NYC, Officials Say

NEW YORK — New York City's middle schoolers are using electronic cigarettes at an alarming rate amid growing concerns about illnesses linked to vaping, city health officials said Tuesday.

About 13,000 — or one in 15 — public middle school students said they were actively using e-cigarettes last year, according to data released by the city's Department of Health. More than twice that number — about 29,000, or 14.4 percent — reported that they had tried vaping at some point, officials said.

The numbers show how e-cigarettes can hook kids on nicotine and underscore the need for a local ban on flavored vaping products that attract young users, city officials said.

"Our data show that Big Tobacco is luring young New Yorkers into nicotine addiction with flavors that appeal to kids," Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city's health commissioner, said in a statement. "Adding the taste of bubblegum and cotton-candy to this unregulated product should not obscure how dangerous it can be."

The new figures came from the Health Department's first-ever survey of middle-schoolers about e-cigarette use. A total of 2,287 sixth- through eighth-graders responded with usable data to the city's anonymous questionnaire in the fall of last year, the department said.

The city released the data a day after state health officials revealed that vaping-related lung illnesses have struck 41 people across New York, including 10 in the city. The sicknesses have hit patients ranging in age from 15 to 46 who used at least one marijuana vape product, according to the state Department of Health.

State officials have not indicated that legal commercial e-cigarettes are linked to the illnesses. But popular vapes such as JUUL nonetheless contain high levels of nicotine that can harm kids' memory, concentration and ability to learn, as well as cancer-causing chemicals such as formaldehyde and benzene, according to city officials.

It's uncertain how kids are getting ahold of vaping products, which cannot be legally sold to anyone younger than 21 in the city. The Health Department said its survey did not include a question about where students got vape products, though it hopes to ask about it in the future.

Middle-schoolers use e-cigarettes more widely than regular cigarettes, though older students are vaping at higher rates than the youngest, the Health Department found.

Some 9 percent of seventh-graders and 8.4 percent of eighth-graders reported using an e-cigarette within the past 30 days last year, compared with 2.6 percent of sixth-graders, the Health Department said. Similarly, more than one in five eighth-graders — 21.4 percent — said they had ever tried vaping, compared with just 5.6 percent of sixth-grade students, according to health officials.

Barbot and others have backed a City Council bill that would ban the sale of flavored e-cigarettes in the five boroughs. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday that he would propose similar state-level legislation, though state Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal has already put such a bill forward.

Moreover, the city Department of Education has updated its discipline code to explicitly ban the possession and use of e-cigarettes in schools and developed educational materials to warn kids about the risks of vaping.

The Health Department's new data show e-cigarettes are now a "major threat" to the city's middle-schoolers, said Council Member Mark Levine, the main sponsor of the city bill.

"Big Tobacco companies have spent years selling vaping products in an array of enticing candy-like flavors that are clearly designed to hook young people and this study shows that those efforts have been successful," Levine, a Manhattan Democrat, said in a statement.

JUUL is also concerned about youth vaping and has taken aggressive steps to combat it, company spokesperson Austin Finan said.

JUUL does not market to youth and exists primarily to help adult cigarette smokers kick their tobacco habit, according to Finan. The company stopped selling non-tobacco flavors to retailers last November and now offers them exclusively online, he said.

"We do not want or need new non-nicotine users," Finan said in a statement. "Our market is the over 1 billion adult smokers worldwide who should have the opportunity to switch to vapor products if they so desire."