Crème Brûlée, Mango, Cool Mint … sound familiar?

Chances are at some point in your high school years you smelled these flavors from a Juul pod — a sleek, skinny stick that 15-year-olds could easily hide for vaping breaks in the school bathroom.

One of my friends had an AirTag attached to her Juul in case she ever lost it.

I never vaped. Nothing about it interested me. I mean, did we not grow up constantly being told how bad smoking is for you? Yet so many people have chosen to pick up vaping at a young age.

And hey, no judgment here; the social pressure to vape was, and still is, prevalent. It is not like I have any issue with being around it, I have been exposed to it since I was 13. Even living on an island in Lake Erie my K-12 school of roughly 70 students could not escape the vaping craze. 

Juul was one of the most successful e-cigarette companies in 2022, when the FDA ordered the company to stop selling its products. Juul denied claims of marketing vapes to children and teens, and the company’s appeal to the ban was considered for two years. In 2024, the Juul ban was revoked and placed under scientific review. This past summer, the FDA granted the brand to sell some of its products again.

Sheila Towson, a clinical assistant professor in DePaul’s School of Nursing, said that Juul’s advertisements on billboards, social media and fruit-flavored options made the product appealing to children and teens.

“There’s a lot of peer pressure. There’s a lot of social media pressure on this, which is giving a lot of misinformation,” Towson said. “A lot of these companies have very much advertised the cool factor.”

But is Juul even considered cool? Even though the brand is no longer in a tiff with the FDA, I doubt it’s anyone’s first vape of choice anymore. Nowadays, you can find vapes that come with a video game or camera attached.

DePaul senior Francesca Tyndall bought her first vape in 10th grade. She said vaping created “a weird sense of community” with groups of students over bell breaks who were chatting and vaping. While that was not the main reason she vaped, it contributed to her continued use. Vaping also became a way to cope with personal struggles and to try to prepare herself for classes she didn’t want to go to.

“It was just kind of not a great high school year, so it was almost like a time for myself,” Tyndall said, almost “like a meditation.”

Many people use vaping as a way to deal with stress or anxiety. According to Towson, the reality is vaping harms our mental health.

“The problem is we have a lot of mental health issues because the brain’s not fully developed yet, not until sometime in (people’s) 20s,” Towson said. “Although they think it’s decreasing anxiety, it’s actually increasing anxiety and depression.”

I don’t recall the health effects of vaping being discussed in our generation’s “drug talks.” Tyndall doesn’t either.

“Our generation, we got all the no smoking — like no smoking cigarettes and the dangers of smoking cigarettes,” she said. “But there wasn’t anything on vaping. So it was very just ‘kind of something fun to try.’”

Now we see people are switching from vapes to cigarettes or other alternatives such as Zyn nicotine pouches. Tyndall is currently trying to quit vaping and switch to cigarettes, so she isn’t constantly “hitting nicotine.”

But are we not moving backwards? While vapes were initially marketed as a “safer” alternative to cigarettes, the reality is that vaping has created an avenue for addiction. 

Will we ever break the cycle? Or will the next “cool” product — or even a former first choice like Juul — just keep prolonging our obsession with a habit we’re now old enough to know is bad for us? 

I’m guessing that the conversation around nicotine addiction won’t be going away anytime soon.

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