Another one of South Portland High School’s strategies for preventing youth vaping is a school club called SoPo Unite. Founded in 2017, more than 60 of South Portland’s 900 students are members.

Participants spread their anti-vaping message in the community and in school — and they’re looking for recruits.

Maggie Whitmore, a senior who’s on the group’s leadership team, said she tells her friends, their younger siblings, middle-schoolers and anyone else who will listen not to waste their money on vaping, because it can ruin their health and result in addiction. “It’s definitely not worth it,” she says.

Whitmore and others in the group stressed that they’re not “narcs” or “snitches.” Many of them have tried vaping and learned the hard way that it wasn’t for them. The group wants as many kids as possible to join, and members are trying to ensure that anyone who vapes as a social activity can find alternative ways to socialize.

Off Campus  

Maine’s new school vaping ban applies to everyone — students, school employees, parents and visitors — and it aims to create a vape-free environment for kids, at least while they’re at school.

But the same statute that raised Maine’s legal smoking age to 21 did away with civil penalties for kids.

The idea was to shift the penalties to stores that sell vaping products to minors rather than punishing the kids, said school resource officer Al Giusto. But he said stores in South Portland weren’t selling vapes to kids in the first place — adults were buying the products for them.

And police have lost leverage, he added. In the past, he said the underage smoking law allowed police to issue a summons to a kid caught smoking and offer them the choice of paying the fine and having it on their record or attending an eight-hour anti-smoking class called Smokeless Saturday.

“I guarantee you nobody ever paid the fine,” he said. “And we had no repeat offenders.”

Americans die of smoking-related illnesses each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 1965, when the agency started keeping records on smoking, the rate of smoking among adults has dropped from about 42% to less than 15% and continues to decline.

Teen smoking declined during the same period, and middle- and high-school attitudes about the substance were consistently negative until vaping started becoming popular in 2016, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Teachers can’t prohibit students from going to the bathroom, but since they tend to prefer vaping in groups, most South Portland teachers now allow only one student at a time to take a bathroom break. But with 50 classes going on at a time, that’s a lot of kids who can text each other and meet up in the bathrooms, Bennett said.

If students go too long without inhaling nicotine, Dodge explained, they typically get sick and vomit. When they’re trying to quit, they tend to vomit so much they start to lose weight, she said.

South Portland’s two assistant principals regularly patrol student bathrooms to check for vaping. Bennett has a bag full of confiscated Juuls as well as other brands of e-cigarettes and the pods or “juice” to refill them.

An Alabama high school reportedly took the doors off student bathroom stalls to prevent kids from hiding while vaping. And a New Jersey school has installed electronic vaping detectors in student bathrooms that set off an alarm in administrative offices when vaping is detected, according to news reports.

Fading Interest?

Although vaping is most prevalent in high schools, a growing number of seventh- and eighth-graders reported vaping in the most recent national survey. Even the elementary schools in South Portland are starting to worry about vaping, Dodge said.

Kids were inhaling an entire Juul pod in a few hours, Dodge said. “They felt light-headed and sick. They had no idea what they were putting in their bodies.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages the use of nicotine patches and nicotine gum for adolescents, because research shows the drug can be permanently damaging to young brains and is not more effective than abstinence at helping kids quit. In South Portland, though, some pediatricians are reportedly starting to rethink that policy.

“We’re concerned that some kids are so addicted that they’re not coming to school,” Dodge said. “I understand that one doctor helped a kid get nicotine gum to help him quit.”

Michael, another senior who didn’t want his full name to be published, said he quit vaping six months ago. For him, he said, the cure was thinking about his mother’s father, a smoker who died young from emphysema. “She lost her father. I couldn’t let that happen to my mother again,” he said. “I just kept telling myself that over and over.

“Part of me is a little OK with the fact that I vaped,” Michael said. “There’s no mystery. I know what happens. I know how it feels. I’ve felt it, and I physically know I don’t like it.”