With the increasing popularity of e-cigarettes and vaping, youth smoking rates have climbed to a 20-year high. By using social media, area college students are teaming up to share the information about how vaping harms health.
On February 22, students from six area colleges and universities, including SUNY Brockport, heard from a local social media star how to create hit dance videos that may move their peers to quit vaping. They then brainstormed and made plans to create their own videos.
The Rochester-area videos will be posted as part of a national campaign from truth, the youth tobacco prevention campaign from Truth Initiative®. The “Ready to Ditch JUUL” TikTok Dance Challenge launched February 27 using #ThisIsQuitting.
The hope is that additional students from each campus will then create and upload their own videos using #ThisisQuitting.
“We hope that by offering a fun and viral way to start the conversation about the realities of vaping, students will see that they are not alone in being turned off by the damage e-cigarettes do,” said Dr. Cynthia Reddeck-LiDestri, vice president of health and wellness at LiDestri Food and Beverage and chair of the Million Hearts Higher Education Health Coalition.
“New and emerging products like e-cigarettes could substantially reverse the health gains we have made in reducing tobacco/nicotine use,” said Annalisa Rogers, director of the Smoking & Health Action Coalition. “Prevention and education being key, we applaud the colleges, student leaders, and Million Hearts’ efforts in facilitating these important conversations. It is one of the most important health actions we can take.”
One in three high school students now vapes. Truth Initiative, the organization behind the truth youth tobacco education campaign is offering young people to quit through a text-based program called This is Quitting. More than 120,000 young people have enrolled in the program since it launched in 2019, and according to data published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research, after two weeks of using the program, more than half – 60.8 percent – reported they had reduced or stopped using e-cigarettes. Young people looking to quit can text “DITCHVAPE” to 88709 to enroll for free.
E-cigarettes contain high levels of nicotine, which can harm developing brains, alter nerve cell functioning and increase the risk of young people smoking cigarettes, research has shown.
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