“I started smoking cigarettes when I started working at a restaurant and I bought my vape because I didn’t wanna keep smoking cigarettes. Then I switched over to Juul. I would vape everywhere, but I don’t vape at school because I don’t need it to make it through school,” Ian Intagliata, senior, said. A Juul does have nicotine in it and is considered the same as a pack of cigarettes worth of nicotine, or 200 puffs of a cigarette. On the other hand, a vape can have both nicotine and non-nicotine juice and the highest is 36 mg of nicotine.

Intagliata has shortness of breath, right after he gets done smoking his Juul.

“I see it as an addiction but I’m not addicted, I don’t think. But if I keep doing it I could get addicted,”

In a survey taken from 9-12th grade students, 183 high school students 91.46% own a Vape or Juul, which is about 75 students out of 83 that took the survey. Out of the same 183 students, 65.85% of them used a Vape or Juul, which is about 54 students out of 83.  Although Juul products, like most e-cigarettes, are made and marketed as smoking alternatives, the device is increasingly popping up on high school and college campuses. 

Dr.Milagros Vascones-Gatski is a Clinical Social Worker/Therapist who graduated from Argosy University in 2015. “In nearly 17 years working with teens, she said, she’s never seen a tobacco product become so popular so quickly,” according to an article from CNN. She works with being able to “Identifying factors that may lead to maladaptive coping skills or addictions is my specialty,” Dr. Milagros said.

One Juul pod used in the device has as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes. People, students are using these instruments as a source of trying to stop smoking. But there is still nicotine in the instruments they are using. So the whole point of using them are gone because they can be as bad for you as straights up smoking cigarettes or even worse. Although it is illegal for people under the age of 18 to purchase e-cigarettes or other tobacco products, underage teens are still finding ways to get their hands on them. “According to the FDA, a recent report from the CDC found that e-cigarette use rose from 1.5% to 16% among high school students and from 0.6% to 5.3% among middle school students from 2011 to 2015; over 2 million high school and middle school students used e-cigarettes in 2016,” Caroline Kee said. Caroline Kee is a health reporter that finds facts about things and writes about them in her Buzzfeeds.

Ian Intagliata started Juuling because he didn’t want to smoke cigarettes anymore. He mastered that but at the same time he knows that it still is a source of a cigarette, just in a different form.