Brockporter health care Sunday - E-cigarette use more than doubles among U.S. middle and high school students from 2011-2012

Press release from the Center For Disease Control on 09/05/13:

The percentage of U.S. middle and high school students who use electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, more than doubled from 2011 to 2012, according to data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The findings from the National Youth Tobacco Survey, in today’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, show that the percentage of high school students who reported ever using an e-cigarette rose from 4.7 percent in 2011 to 10.0 percent in 2012. In the same time period, high school students using e-cigarettes within the past 30 days rose from 1.5 percent to 2.8 percent.  Use also doubled among middle school students.  Altogether, in 2012 more than 1.78 million middle and high school students nationwide had tried e-cigarettes. More than 75 percent of youth users smoke conventional cigarettes too.

Editor's note:

Whether this increased in school age kids using e-cigarettes is good or bad is hard to tell. E-cigarettes can be a form of nicotine replacement for kids trying to quit cigarettes in which case the use of e-cigarettes is a good think for tobacco cessation. On the other hand, if non smoking kids are using e-cigarettes for the nicotine (which I doubt) and they graduate to tobacco, then the use of e-cigarettes is a bad thing. Here in Brockport e-cigarettes are readily available in specialty stores, the drug stores, and Walmart. I do believe you have to be 18 though to purchase them as you do any tobacco products. How strictly the sale of cigarettes is enforced is questionable.