![]() One girl on his dorm hall sold Juul pods from stock she had bought from a guy who ordered armloads on the internet. ![]() He even fixed a Velcro strip on the dresser next to his dorm room bed and stuck the Juul on it, so that as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning he could just reach up for a hit: first, best, only head rush of the day. He knew things had gotten just ridiculous, but there was nothing to be done about it. Repeat.īy now his vaping was about maintenance, keeping the craving irritability at bay. He had 40 minutes between classes: Ten minutes, bike to the dorm. To limit his use, he kept it in his dorm room rather than carry it with him.īut soon, he realized: “All I wanted was to be in my room.” He was majoring in biochemistry at the University of Vermont and feeling overwhelmed by the workload the Juul was his only stress-escape. “The Juul was super, super sneaky and I loved it,” he said.īut by the time he got to college, he began to admit to himself he had a problem. If his parents walked into his room five seconds after he exhaled, they wouldn’t know. What he had initially derided as Juul’s pitiful wisp of nearly odor-free vapor turned out to be a great advantage. Turned away in Reading, Matt and his friends would simply saunter down the block, where they could pass scrutiny. The second was just over the town line in neighboring Woburn, where the legal age until recently was 18. The first won’t sell you e-cigarettes unless you are 21. Near Matt’s house in Reading, a middle-class Boston suburb, there are two convenience stores on West Street. You have to scope out which convenience stores will card you and which will look away, so long as you pay their inflated prices. There is an art and artifice to being a teenage Juuler, Matt explained during numerous long conversations, including one over a recent lunch at a local pizza shop. “We knew it lowered our performance but we saw that as a sacrifice we were willing to make.” He and other athletes noticed they would get out of breath more quickly. By the time he graduated from high school in 2017, four of his five closest friends were also daily Juulers. It became stitched into his social identity, and bound him to his buddies, who would ride around town hitting their Juuls in one friend’s 2002 Volvo. The Juul, he thought, was a harmless way to look like an edgy risk-taker. Focused on achieving academic and financial success, he stayed away from marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes. He’s an easy, approachable kid with a certain sweetness, voted “best personality” by his high school classmates. ![]() Matt doesn’t come across as a cool alpha. He was spending $40 a week, draining his Christmas and birthday money, and his paycheck from his part-time job at Chili’s. Soon, he escalated to a daily pod, sometimes more. Between the cost of the ride service plus the Juul “starter” kit, he spent $100 to sate his need. ![]() He searched Juul’s website to find a local store that sold it, and ordered an Uber to get there, mumbling a nonchalant excuse to relatives. On the third, he couldn’t take it anymore. On his second day without a Juul, he found he wanted one desperately. Its potent addictive properties, doctors say, can be most pronounced in teenagers.Īfter a few weeks of bumming daily hits from friends (called “fiending”), Matt went on a family vacation out West. Perhaps what alarms public health experts most about e-cigarettes generally and Juul in particular is nicotine which, when vaporized, is absorbed by the body within seconds, much faster than when delivered by chewing gum or patches. A 2016 study in the journal Chest said that smoking e-cigarettes had an effect on the heart and arteries which, while was not as pronounced as that of combustible cigarettes, was still distinctive. A joint project between Duke and Yale’s Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science, published this fall in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, found that when certain popular flavors are added to a common solvent in the vaping liquids, they produce chemicals that irritate airways and lungs. The science about long-term effects of the other chemicals and small metals in the vaporized liquids is unsettled, not only because formulations vary widely and are often undisclosed, but because e-cigarettes have not been around long enough to study thoroughly. “And there is a higher risk of them subsequently becoming tobacco smokers.” Rachel Boykan, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stony Brook University School of Medicine and an executive member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ section on tobacco control. “Nicotine may disrupt the formation of circuits in the brain that control attention and learning,” said Dr. ![]()
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