As a young person in Del Norte, I have seen that vaping is an issue affecting other young people. And I’m not the only one to notice this. A group of Del Norte High School students, part of the organization, Storm,which stands for, standing together and overcoming addiction with a radical movement. led by the NorCal4Health project director, Amber Wier, Went to the City Council meeting on Monday, January 10th, asking them to help with stopping vaping issue hurting our fellow teens. Storm told the council about their experiences with vaping and to ask the city to implement a tobacco retail license, especially one that would ban flavored vape products or limit the places where youth can see these products, with some of the members giving personal stories of their families experiences and some sharing more overall experiences that the youth faced.
When the members of STORM were giving their presentation and sharing their stories, some members had brought up that it was impossible to use the restroom during their breaks, and Council Member Smith said,
“I’m very very concerned that its that big of a problem at Del Norte County High School, where all the kids go to, and the reason I’m concerned is because obviously the staff isn’t doing anything about it. That’s my concern, where’s the staff? Where’s the staff when this is going on in the bathrooms?”
But what would you want the school to do? The current admins are already busy enough dealing with what they already have to do, and even if they hired new people for this, it would cause outrage in a second. Think about this, if the school hired people just to watch their kids inside the bathroom, every single parent would be calling to complain about the invasion of privacy going on at the school, and if they were outside the room, it would be impossible to catch anyone vaping since it’s so easy to hide. Vape pens can be slightly larger than a USB drive. It’s really easy to hide it in a sleeve, glove, pocket, or even in a backpack. In order for the school to be able to catch these vapes, there would be a huge price to pay in the privacy of students, and also a price on the taxpayers for the school to be able to afford the new monitoring systems. And on top of that, no matter what the school put in place, the students could still have their vapes
When the meeting was going on, I decided to contact youth I knew who vaped and tried to find out what their experience with vaping is. None of them wanted to share their names, but I’ll let you know what they told me. I asked all of them if they use nicotine vapes or something else, and if they were flavored. All but 1 told me that they used nicotine vapes, and EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. told me that they have only used flavored vapes. One of them told me, “Yes. the flavored ones are the only ones people get, they’re targeted at teenagers. Everyone knows its bad. It’s just the mentality.” When the youth themselves are saying that they only use the flavored vapes, its something we should consider taking action against.
The council also talked about how they thought this was a parenting issue, with members saying,
Smith: “Us as a local government, it’s not our job to parent these kids. It’s their parents’s job.”
Inscore: “I agree”
Greenough: “And I’ll just kinda piggyback off that, It really feels like we’re gonna try and parent the parents by limiting their choices.”
But it ignores where most of the students are getting their vapes, Their friends. When talking to these people who vaped, some of them told be they didn’t want their name attached, just because they were worried of their parents finding out, because their parents didn’t know about it, so if the parents don’t know their kids vape, it’s not something that the parents can fix.
I also asked them how their friends who did buy them got their vapes. I was told that some of them did buy them in town, and while this wasn’t all of them, it’s something to consider since even one of the store owners said in the meeting, “The state can pull my license if I sell underage.” but someone is still selling them to youth, so the current California licenses don’t completely stop these sales since it’s still happening.
After the presentation, when the board was discussing if they should do anything, Council Member Inscore said,
“Does big tobacco have the right to try to make money in our community? And if you guys don’t see it that way I’ll respect your opinions, but the bottom line is you’re defending the right for big business to make money at the expense of the health of our citizens, and we know that. There’s no doubt that that’s what they’re doing. They’re making billions of dollars at the cost of our health.”
At the end of the discussion, the council agreed to discuss this further at a late meeting.
The whole discussion between Storm, The City Council, and the public comments was really interesting to watch, and I’d recommend anyone who has some free time to watch it. It’s available at the City of Crescent City, California Youtube page, with the video that was streamed live on January 10th, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVTYz3vXP0g , with the vaping discussion happening between 42:00 and 2:39:14
I’ll finish this off by saying one last thing. People often say that the youth are our future, and right now, some of the youth are telling you that vaping is a problem and that it is hurting their future. Maybe we should listen to them and see what’s going on
