Can I Hit That?
It’s Friday night. You walk into a foggy pre-game in Jasper and pick up a spiked seltzer while Drake’s latest song blares in the background.
As you look around, every person in the room seems to be hitting the JUUL. You crave the feeling of satisfaction that the girl next to you holds in the palm of her hand. You interrupt her mid-sentence to ask, “Can I hit that?”
E-cigarettes have become ingrained into college drinking culture. The JUUL, marketed as “the smoking alternative,” has created a generation of teenagers and young-adults dependent on the instant gratification of e-cigarettes.
The JUUL attracts college students to its accessible, disguisable and sleek design. While college students may take their first hit to experience with a social norm or to appeal to a coolness factor, students get hooked on the high level of nicotine that accompanies each inhale.
“I initially decided to start because I was around it a lot in a high school setting,” freshman Tomasso Keogh said. “I didn’t really do it because other people were doing it; I did it because I liked the buzz.”
Despite enjoying the buzz, Keogh said he knew it wasn’t a smart idea. He decided to quit before he could build a dependency on the nicotine out of fear for his health. Other Manhattan College students haven’t been able to stop.
A junior communication major, who requested to remain anonymous, has been “juuling” since February 2017. We will call her “Jenny.”
“Everyone around me had one, and I kept using theirs,” Jenny said. “I like the shape of it and how easy it is to use.”
One JUUL pod is equivalent to one pack of cigarettes, or 200 hits at 0.5 percent nicotine.
“It depends on the week, but I usually go through 1-2 packs a week,” Jenny said. “Sometimes I go through a pod a day if I’m stressed or studying a lot. And I go through a pod every night I go out because I let my friends use it.”
Because JUUL pods are “unhealthy” and expensive, now $30 for a pack of four pods of the mint flavor at Jasper Deli, she admitted she has tried to quit a few times without success. She added that she doesn’t smoke cigarettes regularly because she doesn’t like the smell or the feeling she gets from smoking them.
E-cigarettes may seem inventive in the eyes of Gen-Zs who have grown accustomed to anti-smoking campaigns. However, Big Tobacco companies have been utilizing the same strategy for more than a century.
Edward Bernays devised the first public relations campaign in 1929 to encourage women to purchase Lucky Strike cigarettes. Known as the “torches of freedom,” Bernays’s campaign convinced women to smoke cigarettes as a form of empowerment.
“The torches of freedom is a major moment in America’s relationship of persuasion as an industry,” Michael Plugh, Assistant Professor of communication at Manhattan College, said. “As a result of its success, people will, of course, imitate that.”
Due to the anti-smoking public awareness campaigns that were present in the 1990s and 2000s, Plugh said that many people just never started smoking. In the 2010s, vapes and e-cigarettes were successful in changing the conversation around smoking.
“Vaping came along as an alternative to cigarettes which seems to be clean, not leaving butts all over the ground,” Plugh said. “It’s attractive because it glows, it charges and it’s part of your technological tool kit. It tastes like bubblegum instead of like poison, and you don’t feel the burning in your lungs afterwards.”
The marketing campaigns for e-cigarettes imitated the torches of freedom from a technological, anti-pollution, sleek and urbanized framework to appeal to a younger audience.
“If that solved all the negative parts of smoking and kept the cool, then we’re willing to accept it,” Plugh said. “As a technology, vape pens and e-cigarettes solve some of the problems of cigarettes, but they actually make some of them worse and present new problems that we haven’t anticipated or even talked about in public.”
Out of 37 undergraduate students at Manhattan College, 24.3 percent said they smoke cigarettes compared to 59.4 percent who smoke e-cigarettes. Just when it seemed that nicotine additions were a public health concern of the past, e-cigarettes have become a torch to the freedom of teenagers and young adults.
