ASU Undergraduate Student Government aims to include e-cigarettes and vapes in the university’s official ban on tobacco use on campus, falling in line with the FDA’s concerns about the products’ growing popularity.
Aly Perkins, the president of the Undergraduate Student Government Downtown, confirmed the Council of Presidents has included the issue in their priority list this academic year. The council hopes to change the “Tobacco-Free Campus” policy to a include all types of smoking.
“That would expand the definition to include vapes and e-cigarettes,” Perkins said. “Vaping is disruptive not only to student health, but learning as well.”
The use of e-cigarettes among young adults has skyrocketed in recent years, partially due to companies such as JUUL, which can be seen as appealing to adolescents by providing a discreet e-cigarette cartridges and different flavors of vape liquid. The company makes up roughly 70 percent of the e-cigarette industry.
ASU’s Director of Translational Science, Dr. Scott Leischow, has been researching tobacco treatment and cessation products for over 25 years and is currently co-leading an investigation examining the link between e-cigarettes and social media. Prior to this research, he served as Senior Advisor for Tobacco Policy in the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Leischow stresses that the debate of e-cigarette use on campus is complicated because it can be seen as a “harm-reduction” situation because e-cigarettes can be an alternative to smoking for people addicted to regular cigarettes. However, he also emphasized the concern about addiction and regulation when it comes to underage users.
“Based on existing evidence they’re not safe, but they are less harmful,” Leischow said. “The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that the risks of e-cigarettes are lower than combustible cigarettes.”
Leischow said he was interested in the changing patterns of use regarding e-cigarettes.
“Because there’s minimal FDA regulation of e-cigarette type products, they are changing really rapidly as result of the market,” he said.
Some of Leischow’s studies focus on the influence of flavors in e-cigarettes, which help companies appeal to younger people. He said that restricting or eliminating flavors of vape is one way the FDA could regulate e-cigarettes and reduce the appeal to younger users.
That was one deciding factor for ASU sophomore Destiny Scheid, who has been vaping since she was 13 years old. She didn’t think she would have started if there hadn’t been different flavors, she said.
Contrary to the idea that vaping is a problematic habit rooted in people’s social lives, Scheid uses vaping as a sort of solution for another problem – her weight.
“I keep vaping because it helps me balance my weight. It makes me feel like I’m in control,” she said. Scheid explained she eats healthy but vaping helps her with portion control, and helps to prevent her from overeating. “It’s the hand to mouth habit,” she said.
Although her family members have a history of smoking, Scheid does not to put nicotine in her pen and even tries not to inhale much of the vapor. Since she watched her weight go down, she believes it has helped more than harmed her.
Scheid would support regulation on nicotine-based e-cigarettes and vaping on campus such as JUUL, which contain a high amount of nicotine. She doesn’t agree that nicotine-free vaping should be restricted.
Perkins still hopes any regulations made will deter students from vaping on campus.
“ASU has been ranked one of the top healthiest campuses in the nation and I don’t think vapes and e-cigarettes on campus is conducive to that,” she said. “We want to keep it off campus. We don’t want to affect students health in a negative way.”
Leischow hopes to see more exploration in ASU’s vaping policy to examine how different groups would be impacted by certain regulations.
“At ASU, we need to be focusing on the science and base our decision-making and policies on that,” he said. “The science should be a driving force.”
Contact the reporter at ajcutler@asu.edu.
