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There has been a lot of fuss in the press regarding the usefulness and the safety of e-cigarettes. While most health experts say that they have helped many people to quit smoking, they were probably not expecting these tools to become a means for teenagers to start vaping marijuana.
Surprisingly, about 27 percent of the high school students surveyed, who had consumed both marijuana and e-cigarettes, admitted that they would often use the electronic devices to vape pot.
This doesn’t only show how creative teens are, but it also poses a great risk to their health. Electronic cigarettes are supposed to help them quit and are sometimes encouraged by health professionals, which makes it easy to go around smoking cannabis without getting caught.
“It’s so much easier to conceal e-cigarette pot use. Everybody knows that characteristic smell of marijuana, but this vapor is different. It’s possible that teenagers are using pot in a much less detectable way,” said lead study author Meghan Rabbitt Morean, who is an assistant professor at Oberlin College.
The survey took into account the answers of almost 4,000 students all over Connecticut. According to the results of the survey, 28 percent of them had tried vaping e-cigarettes at least once.
The study’s lead author said that marijuana used like this can have an even more damaging effect on people’s health, leading to lung damage, slow learning or short-term memory loss. The most worrying fact is that experts are not able to tell just how many people are doing it and what category of people is most at risk.
Other health experts expressed their concern before about e-cigarettes, saying that almost anything can be vaped in the increasingly popular electronic devices.
According to another report published in the Nicotine and Tobacco Research Journal, the number of e-cigarette users increased by as much as 200 percent between 2011 to 2013 among people who had never tried normal cigarettes.
Even if the study expresses concern about e-cigarettes, supporters of the devices say that the study is very limited, because it only takes into account people from Conneticut, so the results might differ greatly in other states.
Nevertheless, Morean and her team of researchers are not planning to stop here. They announced that they are hoping to receive data from other states as well, to provide further information on the matter.
The study was conducted by researchers from Yale University and its findings were published in the journal Pediatrics, on Monday, September 7.
Image Source: times-herald
