Teens vaping within 5 minutes of waking up is on the rise: study

Wake up and smell the mango Juul pods.

Adolescents who use e-cigarettes within the first five minutes of their day jumped nearly 10% in recent years, a study found.

A study published on Monday in the JAMA Network Open medical journal looked at self-reported data from more than 151,000 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s surveys from middle and high schoolers across the country.

The amount of teens who reached for their e-cigarette within five minutes of waking up was less than 1% between 2014 and 2017, but rose to 10.3% from 2017 to 2021.

“This increase in intensity may reflect increasing use of nicotine for self-medication in response to increases in adolescent depression, anxiety, tic disorders, and suicidality that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers suggested in the study.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a myriad of mental health concerns among teens have skyrocketed to alarming heights, but the use of e-cigarettes to self-medicate creates a vicious cycle as nicotine use has been shown to negatively impact mental and physical health.

Unfortunately, the JAMA study also found that these e-smokers are starting younger, too. Research showed that e-cigarette smokers are getting younger by about 1.9 months per calendar year, with the current average age being 14.5 years old while the age of users first smoking other tobacco products remained stable.

Of those adolescents who currently use any type of tobacco product, the rate of those who reported using an e-cigarette and their first-ever tobacco product increased from 27.2% in 2014 to 78.3% in 2019, and remained at 77% in 2021, according to the data.

In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration placed a ban on flavored e-cigarette cartridges and this summer the agency ordered the popular Juul e-cigarette pulled from shelves. The company has since been ordered to pay $438.5 million to settle claims by 34 US states and territories that asserted it downplayed its products’ risks and targeted underage buyers, a move that many have linked to the e-cigarette epidemic.

The move came on the heels of a nationwide vaping crisis with the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey that finding that more than 5 million kids in middle and high school had used e-cigarettes in the last 30 days with at least 1 million of them having claimed to be daily users, the FDA said. 

“The United States has never seen an epidemic of substance use arise as quickly as our current epidemic of youth use of e-cigarettes,” the then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said at the time.

The researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital who conducted the recent study alerted that the increasing intensity and decreasing age of e-cigarette users calls for a clinical need to address youth nicotine addiction.

“The pandemic has also been a lost year for school-based prevention and treatment efforts, meaning that abatement plans will need to be intensified to address the nicotine addiction in those adolescents who missed a year of contact with adults who might have otherwise helped them get treatment,” the study claimed.