Juul May Be Evil

Honestly, let’s just wipe out 20 years of progress. Per a University of Michigan study:

Among 10th grade students nicotine vaping also increased at a record rate as it doubled and rose eight percentage points, from 8% to 16%. This is the largest percentage point increase ever recorded by the survey for any past 30-day substance use outcome in this grade.

For secondary students in grades 9 through 12 the increases in nicotine vaping translate into at least 1.3 million additional nicotine vapers in 2018 as compared to 2017.

“Vaping is reversing hard-fought declines in the number of adolescents who use nicotine,” said Richard Miech, the lead author and principal investigator of the study. “These results suggest that vaping is leading youth into nicotine use and nicotine addiction, not away from it.”

Or as Kevin Drum prefers, in handy chart format:

Honestly, this is bad.

Vaping in general, and Juul in particular, have wiped out years of hard work to get teens off of cigarettes. And since most of the increase is in vaping nicotine, it means we’re raising yet another generation of addicts, sucked in by the same kind of marketing that was originally used to suck them into cigarette smoking. What a crime this is.