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Young adults who started vaping as teens still can't shake the habit
Many young people who started vaping nicotine as teens several years ago haven’t quit the habit, data show.
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Many young people who started vaping nicotine as teens several years ago haven’t quit the habit, data show.
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G Kumar’s vaping addiction peaked in college at the University of Colorado, when flavored, disposable vapes were taking off.
The disposables would have more than a thousand puffs in them. “I’d go through, let’s say, 1,200 puffs in a week,” said Kumar, who goes by they/them pronouns.
Vaping became a crutch. Like losing a cell phone, losing a vape pen would set off a mad scramble. “It needs to be right next to my head when I fall asleep at night and then in the morning I have to thrash through the sheets and pick it up and find it,” Kumar recalled.
They got sick often, including catching COVID — and vaping through all of it.
Kumar, now 24, did end up quitting. But many of their generation can’t shake the habit.
“Everyone knows it’s not good for you and everyone wants to stop,” said CU senior Jacob Garza who works to raise awareness about substance use as part of the school’s Health Promotion program.
“But at this point, doing it all these years … it’s just second nature now,” he said. “They’re hooked on it.”
For years, slick marketing by e-cigarette companies, and the allure of sweet, fruity or even candy-like flavors and names, led teens to try vaping. As more high schoolers and even younger kids picked up the behavior, doctors and researchers warned it could lead to widespread addiction, creating a ‘Generation Vape.’
Now, new data about substance use among young adults suggests that many of those former teen vaper haven’t quit.
Vaping use drops among teens, rises among young adults
In Colorado, the share of those aged 18 to 24 who regularly vaped rose by about 61% from 2020 to 2022 – to nearly a quarter of that age group.
“That’s an astounding increase in just two years,” says Dr. Delaney Ruston, a primary care physician and documentary filmmaker.
Nationally, vaping rates for young adults increased from 7.6% in 2018 to 11% in 2021.
Disposable electronic cigarette devices displayed for sale on June 26, 2023. While most flavored disposables are officially banned in the U.S., they continue to be sold.
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Disposable electronic cigarette devices displayed for sale on June 26, 2023. While most flavored disposables are officially banned in the U.S., they continue to be sold.
Rebecca Blackwell/AP
Research has shown nicotine is highly rewarding to the brains of young people.
“It’s not surprising that many of them start in high school for social reasons, for all sorts of reasons,” says Ruston, whose latest film is Screenagers Under the Influence: Addressing Vaping, Drugs, and Alcohol in the Digital Age. “And many of them now — we’re seeing this — have continued to college and beyond.”
Meanwhile, vape rates have actually dropped among Colorado high schoolers, said Tiffany Schommer, the tobacco cessation supervisor with Colorado’s state health department.
At one point, before the pandemic, Colorado led the nation in youth vaping, topping 37 states surveyed for use of electronic cigarettes among high school students.
Vaping peaked among minors in Colorado in 2017 with 27% of Colorado youth reporting they had vaped in the past month, according to the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey. But by 2021, the most recent year for which there’s data, that dropped to 16%.
Nationally vaping rates among high schoolers dropped from 28% in 2019 to 12.6% in 2023, according to the Annual National Youth Tobacco Survey.
But for many young people who started vaping at the height of the trend, a habit was set.
“E-cigarette use has increased, particularly among people who have never smoked [traditional cigarettes,]” said Schommer. “So these are folks who started with vapes, continue with vapes.”
Preliminary data indicates that almost half of those vaping 18- to 24-year-olds started vaping before they turned 18, according to the Colorado 2022 Tobacco Attitudes and Behaviors Survey.
‘They weren’t able to stop.’
At Children’s Hospital Colorado, pediatric pulmonologist Dr. Heather De Keyser pulls up on her screen a clouded X-ray of the lung of a young adult damaged by vaping.
“This is a patient with vaping-related lung injury,” she says.
For years, doctors like her and public health experts wondered about the potential harmful impact of vaping on pre-adult bodies and brains — especially the big risk of addiction
Dr. Heather De Keyser, pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, points to the X-ray of a lung of a young adult damaged by vaping.
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Dr. Heather De Keyser, pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, points to the X-ray of a lung of a young adult damaged by vaping.
John Daley/CPR News
“I think, unfortunately those lessons that we were worried we were going to be learning, we’re learning. The data is bearing out in that,” said De Keyser, an associate professor of pediatrics in the Breathing Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado. “We’re seeing increases in those young adults. They weren’t able to stop.”
It’s no coincidence the vaping rates soared during the pandemic, according to several public health experts.
For the past couple of years, undergraduates have talked about the challenges of isolation and using more substances, said Alyssa Wright, Early Intervention program manager at Health Promotion at CU Boulder.
“Just being home, being bored, being a little bit anxious, not knowing what’s happening in the world,” Wright said. “We don’t have that social connection, and it feels like people are still even trying to catch up from that experience.”
Other factors driving addiction are the high nicotine levels in vaping devices, and “stealth culture,” says Chris Lord, CU Boulder’s associate director of the Collegiate Recovery Center.
“The products they were using had five times more nicotine than previous vapes had,” he says. “So getting hooked on that was … almost impossible to avoid.”
As far as “stealth culture,” Lord means that vaping is exciting, something forbidden and secret. “I think as an adolescent, our brains are kind of wired that way, a lot of us,” Lord said.
The Juul effect
Wind the clock back half a decade and one could see the seeds of these current vaping rates.
In 2019, if you typed the word “Juul” into the search bar on YouTube, you could find an endless stream of videos of young people showing off how cool it was to use the company’s sleek, high-tech-looking vaping device.
Juul packages are seen on a shop shelf on December 07, 2022.
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Juul packages are seen on a shop shelf on December 07, 2022.
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In one video Colorado Public Radio found in 2019, two young women show how they “make parties more fun.”
“We just chillin’,’ one says, laughing. “We vapin’ and we Juul-in’.”
Many of those videos are no longer available, pulled off the platform once the trend took off. Searching for Juul now brings up many videos warning of the dangers and how to talk to kids.
All over the U.S., state and local governments, including Colorado, filed suit, alleging Juul Labs misrepresented the health risks of its products.
Juul agreed to pay hundreds of millions in settlements, including a nearly $32 million settlement last year with Colorado.
Juul had become No. 1, the top e-cigarette company, the lawsuits argued, by first aggressively marketing directly to kids, who then spread the word themselves by posting to social media sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
“What vaping has done, getting high schoolers, in some cases even middle schoolers, hooked on vaping, is now playing out,” says Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser, a parent of two teens himself. He said vape companies followed the tobacco industry playbook — with a similar impact on young consumers. “They’re still hooked. This is a very addictive product.”
Juul did not respond to requests for comment.
R.J. Reynolds, which makes another popular brand, Vuse, sent NPR this statement: “We steer clear of youth enticing flavors, such as bubble gum and cotton candy, providing a stark juxtaposition to illicit disposable vapor products.”
Other big vape companies, like Esco Bar, Elf Bar, Breeze Smoke and Puff Bar didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“If we lived in an ideal world, adults would reach the age of 24 without ever having experimented with adult substances. In reality, young adults experiment,” said Greg Conley, director of legislative & external affairs with American Vapor Manufacturers. “This predates the advent of nicotine vaping.”
The FDA banned flavored vape cartridges in 2020 in an effort to crack down on marketing to minors, but the products are still easy to find.
Debate over vaping’s role in smoking cessation
One claim often made in defense of vaping is that it can help users quit cigarette smoking.
Joe Miklosi, a consultant to the Rocky Mountain Smoke-Free Alliance, a trade group for vape shops contends the shops are not driving vaping rates among young adults in Colorado.
“We keep demographic data in our 125 stores. Our average age (of customers) is 42,” he says.
Vape shops sell products to help adult smokers quit, Miklosi says, with lower levels of nicotine than big companies like Juul. Miklosi claims he’s talked to thousands of consumers who claimed vaping helped them quit smoking cigarettes.
But the Colorado data belies that, according to longtime tobacco researcher Stanton Glantz.
The 18-24 age group leads all age groups in regular use, and use gradually dropped with each age cohort, up to the 65+ demographic, of which just 1% use e-cigarettes.
The data are “completely inconsistent with the argument that most e-cigarette use is adult smokers trying to use them to quit,” said Glantz, the now-retired director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California San Francisco.
Glantz says because of the onslaught of sleek technology, flavors, and marketing used by Juul and other companies “the kids are getting addicted younger and faster,” compared to earlier decades when traditional cigarettes dominated the tobacco market.
Finding the will to quit
For recent college graduate G Kumar, now a rock climber, the impetus to quit vaping was more ecological than health-related. It was “knowing the amount of trash [from used up vape devices] that I was accumulating and the amount of money I was spending,” they said.
Kumar got some help from a package of cessation literature and quitting aids from CU’s Health Promotion program. It included two boxes of eucalyptus-flavored toothpicks, which tasted awful to Kumar, but provided a distraction and helped with oral cravings.
“The fact that I could just gnaw on toothpicks for weeks on end was, I think, what kept me sane,” Kumar said.
It took a while and a lot of willpower to overcome the intense psychological craving, something many others in that generation know all too well.
This story was produced in partnership with CPR News and KFF Health News.
Dr. Tyler Jorgensen sets “A Charlie Brown Christmas” on a record player at Dell Seton Medical Center in Austin Texas. He uses vinyl records as a form of music therapy for palliative care patients.
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AUSTIN, TEXAS — Lying in her bed at Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas at Austin, 64-year-old Pamela Mansfield sways her feet to the rhythm of George Jones’ “She Thinks I Still Care.” Mansfield is still recovering much of her mobility after a recent neck surgery, but she finds a way to move to the music floating from a record player that was wheeled into her room.
“Seems to be the worst part is the stiffness in my ankles and the no feeling in the hands,” she says. “But music makes everything better.”
The record player is courtesy of the ATX-VINyL program, a project dreamed up by Dr. Tyler Jorgensen to bring music to the bedside of patients dealing with difficult diagnoses and treatments. He collaborates with a team of volunteers who wheel the player on a cart to patients’ rooms, along with a selection of records in their favorite genres.
“I think of this record player as a time machine,” he said. “You know, something starts spinning — an old, familiar song on a record player — and now you’re back at home, you’re out of the hospital, you’re with your family, you’re with your loved ones.”
Daniela Vargas, a volunteer for the ATX-VINyL program, wheels a record player to the hospital room of a palliative care patient in Austin, Texas.
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The healing power of Country music… and Thin Lizzy
Mansfield wanted to hear country music: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, George Jones. That genre reminds her of listening to records with her parents, who helped form her taste in music. Almost as soon as the first record spins, she starts cracking jokes.
“I have great taste in music. Men, on the other hand … ehhh. I think my picker’s broken,” she says.
Other patients ask for jazz, R&B or holiday records.
The man who gave Jorgensen the idea for ATX-VINyL loved classic rock. That was around three years ago, when Jorgensen, a long-time emergency medicine physician, began a fellowship in palliative care — a specialty aimed at improving quality of life for people with serious conditions, including terminal illnesses.
Shortly after he began the fellowship, he says he struggled to connect with a particular patient.
“I couldn’t draw this man out, and I felt like he was really struggling and suffering,” Jorgensen said.
He had the idea to try playing the patient some music.
He went with “The Boys Are Back in Town,” by the 1970s Irish rock group Thin Lizzy, and saw an immediate change in the patient.
“He was telling me old stories about his life. He was getting more honest and vulnerable about the health challenges he was facing,” Jorgensen said. “And it just struck me that all this time I’ve been practicing medicine, there’s such a powerful tool that is almost universal to the human experience, which is music, and I’ve never tapped into it.”
Dr. Tyler Jorgensen plays vinyl records as a form of music therapy for palliative care patients in Austin, Texas. Willie Nelson’s albums are a perennial hit.
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Creating new memories
Jorgensen realized records could lift the spirits of patients dealing with heavy circumstances in hospital spaces that are often aesthetically bare. And he thought vinyl would offer a more personal touch than streaming a digital track through a smartphone or speaker.
“There’s just something inherently warm about the friction of a record — the pops, the scratches,” he said. “It sort of resonates through the wooden record player, and it just feels different.”
Since then, he has built up a collection of 60 records and counting at the hospital. The most-requested album, by a landslide, is Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours from 1977. Willie is also popular, along with Etta James and John Denver. And around the holidays, the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas gets a lot of spins.
These days, it’s often a volunteer who rolls the record player from room to room after consulting nursing staff about patients and family members who are struggling and could use a visit.
Daniela Vargas, the UT Austin pre-med undergraduate who heads up the volunteer cohort, became passionate about music therapy years ago when she and her sister began playing violin for isolated patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said she sees similar benefits when she curates a collection of records for a patient today.
“We are usually not in the room for the entire time, so it’s a more intimate experience for the patient or family, but being able to interact with the patient in the beginning and at the end can be really transformative,” Vargas said.
Often, the palliative care patients visited by ATX-VINyL are near the end of life.
Jorgensen feels that the record player provides an interruption of the heaviness those patients and their families are experiencing. Suddenly, it’s possible to create a new, positive shared experience at a profoundly difficult time.
“Now you’re sort of looking at it together and thinking, ‘What are we going to do with this thing? Let’s play something for Mom, let’s play something for Dad.’” he said. “And you are creating a new, positive, shared experience in the setting of something that can otherwise be very sad, very heavy.”
Other patients, like Pamela Mansfield, are working painstakingly toward recovery.
She has had six neck surgeries since April, when she had a serious fall. But on the day she listened to the George Jones album, she had a small victory to celebrate: She stood up for three minutes, a record since her most recent surgery.
With the record spinning, she couldn’t help but think about the victories she’s still pursuing.
“It’s motivating,” she said. “Me and my broom could dance really well to some of this stuff.”
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By Caroline Kitchener, Melanie Bencosme, Karen Hanley, June Kim and Pierre Kattar
December 22, 2025
After prolonged heavy rainfall and devastating flooding across the Pacific north-west in the past few weeks, further flood watches have been issued across California through this week.
With 50-75mm (2-3in) of rainfall already reported across northern California this weekend, a series of atmospheric rivers will continue to bring periods of heavy rain and mountain snow across the northern and central parts of the state, with flood watches extending until Friday.
Cumulative rainfall totals are expected to widely exceed 50mm (2in) across a vast swathe of California by Boxing Day, but with totals around 200-300mm (8-12in) possible for the north-western corner of California and western-facing slopes of the northern Sierra Nevada mountains.
Los Angeles could receive 100-150mm (4-6in) of rainfall between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which could make it one of the wettest Christmases on record for the city. River and urban flooding are likely – particularly where there is run-off from high ground – with additional risks of mudslides and rockslides in mountain and foothill areas.
Winter storm warnings are also in effect for Yosemite national park, with the potential for 1.8-2.4 metres (6-8ft) of accumulating snow by Boxing Day. Heavy snow alongside strong winds will make travel very difficult over the festive period.
Heavy rain, lightning and strong winds are forecast across large parts of Zimbabwe leading up to Christmas. A level 2 weather warning has been issued by the Meteorological Services Department from Sunday 21 December to Wednesday 24 December. Some areas are expected to see more than 50mm of rainfall within a 24-hour period. The rain will be accompanied by hail, frequent lightning, and strong winds. These conditions have been attributed to the interaction between warm, moist air with low-pressure systems over the western and northern parts of the country.
Australia will see some large variations in temperatures over the festive period. Sydney, which is experiencing temperatures above 40C, is expected to tumble down to about 22C by Christmas Day, about 5C below average for this time of year. Perth is going to see temperatures gradually creep up, reaching a peak of 40C around Christmas Day. This is about 10C above average for this time of year.
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