Searching for the Smoking Gun
The vaping epidemic in the Oxford community
By Anna Minton
Miami University journalism student
When Katie Lockhart first saw someone vaping, she thought there might be a fire.
“The first time that I saw it in high school was actually on the bus my senior year, for some reason,” said the former Talawanda High School student. “I remember I was sitting closer to the front, and I could see in the bus driver’s rearview mirror. And in the back, I just saw this big puff of smoke.”
Eventually, Lockhart’s friends explained what was going on. But even when one of her friends told her it was another student vaping, Lockhart was still confused.
“When I turned around, it was all over the back of the bus,” Lockhart said. “And I saw a girl push her window down, and try to swat the smoke out the window out of the bus. And I kept thinking, is that necessary? Is that what you want to go into your body?”
Talawanda School District is just one of the hundreds of districts caught in the midst of the teen vaping epidemic. According to a September 2019 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in every four high school students has used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days.
A Public Health Concern
According to the National Cancer Institute, an e-cigarette is “a device that has the shape of a cigarette, cigar, or pen and does not contain tobacco.” These devices use batteries and contain a solution of nicotine, flavorings and other possibly harmful chemicals that turns into a mist that can be inhaled into the lungs.
One of the controversies surrounding e-cigarettes is their actual impact on public health. Originally, the product was marketed as an alternative to traditional tobacco smoking. However, the authors of an article in the Journal of the American Heart Association note that “no clear consensus has emerged” about e-cigarettes’ usefulness in helping people stop smoking. The Center on Addiction also points out that, in some cases, the nicotine in e-cigarettes and vapes could actually make it harder for people to stop smoking altogether.
There is more research that details some of the side effects of e-cigarette products, such as damage to the brain, heart, and lungs and cancerous tumor development. In addition, the Center on Addiction has reported that these products are especially harmful for adolescents.
“There is a perception that vaping is safe. These reports of serious lung illnesses linked to vaping products show that this is simply not true,” said Lori Landis, Director of Nursing at BCGHD in a press release from the Butler County General Health District. “We are seeing a tremendous increase in vaping among youth. This is a public health crisis.”
This past September, the Butler County General Health District announced that they were partnering with the Ohio Department of Health to investigate the first case in Butler County of “severe pulmonary illness among people who reported vaping.” While they couldn’t connect the issue to a specific type of e-cigarette, doctors do believe that it was directly caused by vaping products.
“Our job is to take reports from clinicians who see a case that they think is related to vaping,” said Jennifer Bailer, Butler County General Health District Health Commissioner. “So that means that when someone goes to their doctors or nurse practitioner or primary care clinic or a hospital, and report symptoms that seem like they might be related to severe pulmonary disease associated with vaping, then they are required to report that to us, and we distribute the information to the public.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25 people have died of vape-related lung disease as of early December 2019. There have been 2,291 cases of the illness reported to the agency from all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Many of the symptoms of vaping-induced pulmonary disease are similar to a common cold — cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, and sometimes a fever — which makes it seem less serious than it is. Bailer has been working to communicate to the public that this epidemic is serious.
“There is a severity level to this whole thing,” said Bailer. “These people are not just tired, they don’t just have a cold. They are really sick.”
Vape products have been on the market since 2003, and it has only been in the past couple of years that information regarding their health effects has been publicly available.
“There have been only a few reported cases, in Butler County so far — reported being the optimal word,” said Bailer. “There could very well have been other cases of people who were sick that didn’t get reported, and cases that may be occurred before all of the information came out.”
Vaping Concerns Talawanda Schools
While it is clear that the vaping epidemic is here in Oxford, and is affecting the town’s younger residents, there are groups who are taking action. At the August 2019 Talawanda Board of Education meeting, the Health Coordinating Council announced it was looking into how to combat vaping in the schools. According to the meeting highlights, the council, which is a group of community partners interested in health, has been looking into “non-academic barriers to learning,” and sees vaping as an important issue.
At a Board of Education meeting in October, the school district also opted to change some of its rules regarding smoking. Just this past month, the Board of Education added a new rule that school administrators are not allowed to smoke on school property, in addition to previous rules focused on the smoking of teachers and school staff.
The Board of Education also amended a rule that limited, and in some cases removed, automated smoking breaks for teachers, staff and administrators on school property. These new rules were proposed and passed over a year after the school district received a state grant in 2018 specifically for substance abuse prevention and education.
The Health Coordinating Council received a renewal this year of the $75,000 grant to support substance abuse prevention education. This grant helped fund the Youth Action Committee, which connected the middle school and high school to students at Miami University.
“We thought it would be a win-win if we had Miami and Talawanda students working together,” said Amy Macechko, Health Coordinator for Talawanda City School District and Youth Action Committee Coordinator. “We wanted to see what were some collective ideas that we could come together on that identified issues on all three levels- and the topic of e-cigarette use has come up at the middle school, high school and university level as a concern.”
While most of the Talawanda students who are involved with the Youth Action Committee are in middle school, Macechko said that she still wants to make sure that all levels are working together to create intervention ideas.
“So the idea of having the three groups together is to really empower students to recognize that no use or low-risk use is really the norm,” Macechko said. “One particular strategy is along the lines of youth-led prevention. We are building up this team and empowering this team to really make an impact when it comes to spreading that message.”
Katie Lockhart was one of the students recruited at Miami University to help mentor some of the younger students, as she went to both Talawanda Middle School and Talawanda High School. She is now a sophomore at Miami.
“I was right there with my older sisters, so I could see all of it,” said Lockhart in regards to college students’ tobacco use. “It was all right there, and really easy to see. It was definitely prevalent, but kind of outweighed by the university and all the benefits from being in a college town at the time.”
According to Lockhart, e-cigarette use didn’t get bad until her senior year of high school. Before that day on the bus, she had only heard rumors. However, after the summer of 2018, vapes became unavoidable.
“After that, I would hear all the time about Juuls getting popular, and people buying them and selling them,” Lockhart said. “People would smoke in class, people would go into the bathroom to vape, you heard about it everywhere. Now, it’s just huge and it has grown so much.”
Lockhart has heard a lot from younger members of the Youth Action Committee about new efforts to enforce the no-smoking policy at Talawanda. According to the middle school members, each individual school has its own “resource officer” to monitor students for substance abuse, specifically, e-cigarettes.
“I’ve heard that they have people almost guard the bathrooms,” said Lockhart. “I’ve heard from some of the middle school students at one of our meetings that they would have the resource officer by the bathroom during period changes. And if they see a Juul or vape pen in either the middle school or the high school, they can take it away immediately.”
Macechko, on the other hand, believes that the approach to disciplining students focuses less on an “enforcer role” and more on an “educator role.”
“We don’t want to just slap down a suspension and removing the student from school for a couple of days,” Macechko said. “We are keeping students in school and doing intervention education with them.”
Whether serving as an enforcer or educator, Lockhart still sees Talawanda as being a bit more proactive on the issue than Miami University can be given its population.
“I think the main struggle is how to combat it because everyone here is an adult,” said Lockhart. “We can promote things, and we can give out information. But we really can’t actually do anything about it. It’s their body. They can put in it what they want.”
Miami’s Influence On Issue
According to Miami’s Smoke and Tobacco-Free Environment policy, all university campuses are designated as free from all smoke and tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. This ban on smoking products continues on to all “Miami University-owned facilities and on the grounds of any university-owned property,” according to the policy’s website. This includes all academic buildings, residence halls and university-owned off-campus housing.
The website states that any students, staff or faulty caught violating this policy are subject to disciplinary action. The policy even goes as far as to say that violators can also be prosecuted for violating Ohio’s smoking ban under the Ohio Revised Code.
However, some see this policy as contradicting itself. While the university claims to enforce a strict ban on smoking products, they also state in the policy that they “actively promote and provide smoking cessation assistance and nicotine therapy assistance” to faculty and students. Though results of research on the topic are mixed, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine claims that when specifically paired with behavioral support, e-cigarettes could serve as an effective form of smoking cessation assistance. Which raises the question of whether individuals at Miami might be permitted to vape on campus if they claim to use vape pens or e-cigarettes to quit smoking.
Miami’s policy only applies to university property, and given the fact there are three vape shops open in Oxford it would certainly seem as though students may be vaping away from campus. Seeing college students vaping can make it seem safe to younger teens.
“I think there is pressure to engage in activities, perhaps at a younger age than kids who don’t have a university right in their sphere of influence,” said Health Commissioner Bailer on how being a college town might influence Oxford’s experience of this epidemic. “I also think that there are opportunities for potentially older college students to make purchases for younger high school students.”
Macechko agreed with Bailer while adding that the “party environment” might be giving students a warped sense of what substance abuse is really like and lead them to believe everyone is using a substance of some kind.
“It is really easy — especially at the middle schooler’s age — to think that everybody is doing this and that you’re the only one that’s not,” said Macechko. “We need to change that narrative, and make sure that the message is getting out that really, you are in the majority if you do don’t use.”
Helping students make informed decisions is a priority of Lockhart’s as well.
“We really understand that in college, you are your own person,” said Lockhart. “What we are trying to get across to people — in the middle school, in the high school, and at Miami University — is just that if you’re going to do something, be smart about it. Make your own decisions, but understand the consequences too. Just try to make healthy choices and be safe.”
That issue of safety is likely at the forefront of the minds of many working to educate individuals of the dangers of vaping.
As of December 3, there have been 75 cases of vaping-related illnesses reported in Ohio. Two of those, according to the Ohio Department of Health, diagnosed in Butler County.
