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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.
Daisy-Daisy/Getty Images
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.
One observer of the current Senate race in Louisiana noted that Sen. Bill Cassidy could lose his reelection bid.
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Annie Flanagan for NPR
Sen. Bill Cassidy lost Saturday’s Louisiana Republican primary according to a race call by the Associated Press.
Cassidy, who served two terms in the Senate, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Trump after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. That vote put him at odds with Trump and his MAGA coalition, ultimately leading Trump to push Rep. Julia Letlow to run against Cassidy.
Cassidy’s bid for a third term was viewed as a test of Trump’s grip on the party–and of what voters want from their representatives in Washington. The primary pitted Cassidy, a veteran lawmaker, former physician and chair of the powerful Senate health committee, against Letlow, a political newcomer and a millennial MAGA loyalist.
A detailed view of a hat that reads, Run Julia Run, is seen at a campaign event for Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) on May 6, 2026 in Franklinton, Louisiana.
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A former college administrator, Letlow won a special election in 2021 for the House seat her late husband, Luke, was set to assume before he died from COVID in 2020.
In Congress, Letlow sponsored a bill to collect oral histories from the pandemic and has focused on education and children. She introduced the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would allow parents to review classroom materials like library books and require schools to notify parents if their child requests different pronouns, locker rooms or sports teams.
She also serves on the powerful appropriations committee and has embraced Trump’s agenda.
Letlow, who came first in Saturday’s primary, will face Louisiana state Treasurer John Fleming in the runoff on June 27. Cassidy came in third.
The election result is a victory for President Trump who has put Republican loyalty to the test on the ballot so far this year in Indiana state senate primaries and in Cassidy’s race.
Another major test of Trump’s influence comes in Kentucky’s primary on Tuesday when Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who has found himself at odds with the president, faces a challenger endorsed by Trump.
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Brass bands in Beijing make way for sticker shock at home as Trump returns to escalating inflation
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump returned from the spectacle of a Chinese state visit to a less than welcoming U.S. economy — with the military band and garden tour in Beijing giving way to pressure over how to fix America’s escalating inflation rate.
Consumer inflation in the United States increased to 3.8% annually in April, higher than what he inherited as the Iran war and the Republican president’s own tariffs have pushed up prices. Inflation is now outpacing wage gains and effectively making workers poorer. The Cleveland Federal Reserve estimates that annual inflation could reach 4.2% in May as the war has kept oil and gasoline prices high.
Trump’s time with Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears unlikely to help the U.S. economy much, despite Trump’s claims of coming trade deals. The trip occurred as many people are voting in primaries leading into the November general election while having to absorb the rising costs of gasoline, groceries, utility bills, jewelry, women’s clothing, airplane tickets and delivery services. Democrats see the moment as a political opportunity.
“He’s returning to a dumpster fire,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank focused on economic issues. “The president will not have the faith and confidence of the American people — the economy is their top issue and the president is saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”
The president’s trip to Beijing and his recent comments that indicated a tone-deafness to voters’ concerns about rising prices have suggested his focus is not on the American public and have undermined Republicans who had intended to campaign on last year’s tax cuts as helping families.
Trump described the trip as a victory, saying on social media that Xi “congratulated me on so many tremendous successes,” as the U.S. president has praised their relationship.
Trump told reporters that Boeing would be selling 200 aircraft — and maybe even 750 “if they do a good job” — to the Chinese. He said American farmers would be “very happy” because China would be “buying billions of dollars of soybeans.”
“We had an amazing time,” Trump said as he flew home on Air Force One, and told Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview that gasoline prices were just some “short-term pain” and would “drop like a rock” once the war ends.
Inflationary pain is not a factor in how Trump handles Iran
Trump departed from the White House for China by saying the negotiations over the Iran war depended on stopping Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
That remark prompted blowback because it suggested to some that Trump cared more about challenging Iran than fighting inflation at home. Trump defended his words, telling Fox News: “That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again.”
The White House has since stressed that Trump is focused on inflation.
Asked later about the president’s words, Vice President JD Vance said there had been a “misrepresentation” of the remarks. White House spokesman Kush Desai said the “administration remains laser-focused on delivering growth and affordability on the homefront” while indicating actions would be taken on grocery prices.
But as Trump appeared alongside Xi, new reports back home showed inflation rising for businesses and interest rates climbing on U.S. government debt.
His comments that Boeing would sell 200 jets to China caused the company’s stock price to fall because investors had expected a larger number. There was little concrete information offered about any trade agreements reached during the summit, including Chinese purchases of U.S. exports such as liquefied natural gas and beef.
“Foreign policy wins can matter politically, but only if voters feel stability and affordability in their daily lives,” said Brittany Martinez, a former Republican congressional aide who is the executive director of Principles First, a center-right advocacy group focused on democracy issues.
“Midterms are almost always a referendum on cost of living and public frustration, and Republicans are not immune from the same inflation and affordability pressures that hurt Democrats in recent cycles,” she added.
Democrats see Trump as vulnerable
Democratic lawmakers are seizing on Trump’s comments before his trip as proof of his indifference to lowering costs. There is potential staying power of his remarks as Americans head into Memorial Day weekend facing rising prices for the hamburgers and hot dogs to be grilled.
“What Americans do not see is any sympathy, any support, or any plan from Trump and congressional Republicans to lower costs – in fact, they see the opposite,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday.
Vance faulted the Biden administration for the inflation problem even though the inflation rate is now higher than it was when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with a specific mandate to fix it.
“The inflation number last month was not great,” Vance said Wednesday, but he then stressed, “We’re not seeing anything like what we saw under the Biden administration.”
Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 under Biden, a Democrat. By the time Trump took the oath of office, it was a far more modest 3%.
Trump’s inflation challenge could get harder
The data tells a different story as higher inflation is spreading into the cost of servicing the national debt.
Over the past week, the interest rate charged on 10-year U.S. government debt jumped from 4.36% to 4.6%, an increase that implies higher costs for auto loans and mortgages.
“My fear is that the layers of supply shocks that are affecting the U.S. economy will only further feed into inflationary pressures,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.
Daco noted that last year’s tariff increases were now translating into higher clothing prices. With the Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s ability to impose tariffs by declaring an economic emergency, his administration is preparing a new set of import taxes for this summer.
Daco stressed that there have been a series of supply shocks. First, tariffs cut into the supply of imports. In addition, Trump’s immigration crackdown cut into the supply of foreign-born workers. Now, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off the vital waterway used to ship 20% of global oil supplies.
“We’re seeing an erosion of growth,” Daco said.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
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