Vaping has progressed well beyond a cigarette alternative,” Richard Miech, a senior investigator on the Monitoring the Future project, said in a statement. He added that these figures may underestimate the number of students who vaped nicotine, since the drug may have been present in other vaping liquids without teens realizing it.
This embrace of vaping may portend a future rise in cigarette use, Volkow warned.
“Overall, the consensus is that nicotine, when you take it by vaping, is less dangerous than when you smoke combustible tobacco,” she said. “But nicotine is an addictive drug.” It will take time to see whether vaping makes teens more likely to become cigarette smokers, but early studies suggest this may be the case, she said.
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