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Vital Stories

A Teen Perspective on Smoking in New York City: Wins and Losses

I am a teenager in 2016 New York City, and my peer group smokes few cigarettes, and is perhaps one of the most smoke-free young communities around the country.

Student smoking has declined dramatically in the U.S. in recent years, falling from 35.4% in 1997 to 15.7% in 2013. And teen smoking has reached even lower numbers in New York State, where it is currently 8.8%.

Both the city and the state have put a significant amount of resources into their anti-smoking campaigns as well, and have been at the forefront of the fight against smoking in the United States. However, while fewer teens – and New Yorkers – are smoking than ever before, my experience as a high school student in Manhattan has shown me that the attitudes towards tobacco and the prevalence of its use in teenage social circles are more mixed than the data would suggest.

The general atmosphere around cigarettes in my high school was indifference. Few people openly smoked cigarettes and many people steered clear of smoking out of fear, but only a small number of people actually had a negative view of tobacco. For most, it was just another drug that, like all drugs, had some damaging effects on its user’s health. Because of this, cigarettes were used almost as a party drug, akin to alcohol or even marijuana by some. Cigarettes were used mainly on weekends when socializing and going out. They were social smokers.

Many of my friends would smoke cigarettes only at parties or when they drank, stating that they were not addicted, but liked the buzz it gave them when they were drinking. Many of these friends did not become regular users, but some did eventually transition to becoming regular smokers, and in turn formed a significant portion of my school’s smoking populations. The majority of these smokers tended to keep their smoking fairly private once they started, as many were somewhat embarrassed of their new habit. Still, these smokers only represented a small number of the students in my class and only added a few new smokers to a not very large group.

A large factor in this pool being otherwise so small was that cigarettes had lost a lot of the “cool” factor that once enticed teenage users. The reason many people didn’t smoke was not as much because they saw reasons not to smoke, but because they saw no reason to smoke. Without the association of coolness that once came with cigarettes, otherwise indifferent teens remained indifferent to cigarettes, and didn’t smoke them.

Smoking’s “esteem” in most teens’ eyes, it seemed, had been taken up by the newest nicotine trend – vaping. Vaping was generally seen by smokers and non-smokers alike as having coolness to it. Something about it – the act, the look of the vapor, the smell, the modern vaporizer – struck a chord with many of my fellow classmates. Aiding this view in heightening vaping’s popularity was the fact that the majority of teens – even those who feared cigarettes’ consequences – saw vaping as essentially harmless.

“It’s only vapor, it isn’t bad for you,” was a line repeated to me many times by friends trying to urge me to partake. This view of vaping made it significantly more popular than cigarettes among my peers. With no fears of negative repercussions from vaping, I saw many friends transition from vaping nicotine-free oils fairly irregularly, to vaping nicotine-containing oils on a regular basis.

Unwavered by nicotine’s addictiveness, they saw vaping as a harmless way of getting nicotine buzz at parties, at home, or even just walking down the street. From this, many of my peers went on to stronger ways of ingesting nicotine. Some bought more concentrated oils. Others bought more powerful vaping devices such as “Juuls”, which supposedly gave single hits as powerful as half a cigarette. Some simply started smoking cigarettes. These were the smokers who formed a good portion of my and other schools’ smoking communities.

Unlike those who started as social smokers, these smokers didn’t seem ashamed of their habit. They would smoke while out with friends fairly regularly and weren’t as much concerned with the repercussions cigarettes might have on their health. That was because they had come to cigarettes through their vaping; it was cool. They may now have had an addition, but it was still a habit they had initially started for its appearance, and for them that was still what mattered more than anything else.

While we are not certain about all the effects of these new nicotine devices, vaping is slowly taking over the cultural place cigarettes once held with New York’s high school students. It remains to be seen what the long term effects will be, but until then it is certain it will continue to serve as an attractive alternative to cigarettes for young people in a city which has for their whole lives warned them of its dangers.

Akiva Singer is interning at Vital Strategies this summer. His main interests are environmental protection and public health. He will be starting college at Vanderbilt University in the fall.