Experts are already concerned about the rising rate of e-cigarette use among teenagers, but a new study out of Yale shows they might have a new concern: many high schoolers are also vaping marijuana.
According to the survey of 3,847 Connecticut students published in the journal Pediatrics, 27.9 percent of the teens copped to using e-cigarettes. Of the group who had experimented with e-cigarettes, 18.7 percent said they had also vaporized cannabis. Roughly 26.5 percent of those who had ever smoked pot in their lives had also vaped it.
Teens reported using e-cigs to vape hash oil and a waxy substance that contains THC, the main ingredient in marijuana that makes people high. Lead author Meghan E. Morean, an assistant professor of psychology at Oberlin College, was working in the lab of senior co-author Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin at Yale when she picked up on the trend.
Morean notes several studies had already noted the use of e-cigs to vape pot when she heard teens might be catching on, too. “Several high school students who were participating in an unrelated study had mentioned that teenagers are using e-cigarettes to vaporize cannabis in Connecticut,” she tells Yahoo Health. “After doing some background research, we realized that there were no scientific studies on this topic.”
Related: Your Body After Vaping an E-Cigarette
Originally designed for nicotine solutions, e-cigarettes have been used with cannabis-containing substances like hash oil for some time. “But we did not expect that teens would be using e-cigarettes for this purpose, especially at the rates we observed,” Morean says. “However, teenagers are resourceful, and in light of the rapid increase in the popularity of e-cigarettes among teens, perhaps it was only a matter of time until they put the two together.”
Providing some of the first documented evidence that vaping cannabis is trending among teens, Morean hopes the study raises awareness that teens are catching on to something potentially dangerous.
“Vaporizing cannabis is more discreet than smoking marijuana in traditional forms, like joints or pipes, because the smell of the vapor is not as strong as smoked marijuana,” she says. “In addition, forms of cannabis that can be vaporized, like hash oil, often are considerably more potent than marijuana that is smoked.”
If it’s easier to hide, the concern is that more teens will be getting high.
Fuente: www.yahoo.com
