I would vape every day.

24-7.

Every chance I could.

I would try and take that hit.

Every hour, once every 15 or 20 minutes, I would wake up in the middle of the night, take a hit.

Most of the time, I never left my hand.

I just kind of learned how to do things with just one hand.

When I first started vaping, I used to get them from friends, maybe having one puff bar a week, and I thought that was enough.

But I soon started vaping more and I'd go through a puff bar every three days and one just wasn't enough.

The brain doesn't fully develop until we're about 25, so when youth are using these products that contain nicotine, it's easier for them to get addicted.

Nicotine affects the way the brain works.

It can affect mood, impulse control, learning, attention, all of those things that our teens are doing daily.

Even though I've been off of it for like a month and a half, like I still remember and crave how it feels, you know?

And every time I wake up, I think about how good it would be to have one.

I feel like it's never going to go away.

And I just wish I never did it, you know?

When we see kids in the hospital with vape related injury, it goes along with respiratory symptoms such as shortness of breath, low oxygen levels, difficulty with exercise.

I was in boxing for like three years.

I loved it.

I was really good at boxing.

I was getting into like more top fights with people that I thought were like, crazy good.

And then I started vaping, and that's when a lot of things started to change.

I started getting shortness of breath.

I didn't really feel motivated to go to practice.

I just wanted to go to my room and relax and start vaping and just kick back.

Sometimes whenever I hit it my lungs would hurt.

Like, I felt like I couldn't breathe after.

I’d start coughing.

I remember like sometimes whenever I would take too many hits, I’d puke.

I don't know if that's normal, but my nose would bleed.

Vaping held me back from a lot of things I love to do.

In June of 2019, the CDC started getting reports of a lot of people being hospitalized due to vaping.

They had a 95% hospitalization rate with this.

What this was is e-cigarette vaping associated lung injury.

What happens that causes evali is that you get inflammation, you get acute lung injury and you get a diffused pneumonia.

That happens within the lung.

It's a constellation of symptoms that's associated with vaping.

We've known that there are several thousand cases of evali that have been reported and somewhere between 50 and 100 deaths.

Just this year we had our first lung transplant here in Idaho from vaping.

Patient said that they had vaped for about a year, which for a young person that's just an unheard of.

That's the issue I see with vaping is it's quick, so fast on the damage it does.

Through my research, which we've been doing this for about ten years, we're interested in E-Liquids that are found in e-cigarette products and looking at their toxicities.

One of the biggest misconceptions that I hear when it comes to vaping is that it's safer than smoking conventional tobacco, which is absolutely not true.

The vehicle that's used to dissolve the e-liquids actually makes it easier for it to dissolve into your lungs.

The amount of nicotine in these e-liquids that we are studying is astronomically larger than the amount of nicotine that we see in regular tobacco cigarettes.

So there could be an even greater impact on bone cells specifically.

When we expose the bone cells in our research to the e-liquids, even at really low concentrations, we can see that as the concentration of e-liquids increases, so does the number of damaged cells.

And you can see that really clearly under the microscope.

The only difference in the cells that we treat and the cells that we leave as our controls is the amount of e-liquids that we expose them to.

And on one side you see living cells, and on the other side you see dead cells.

From our studies, we've determined that the menthol and cinnamon flavors are the most toxic.

A lot of these effects are happening independent of nicotine.

And so the flavorings are having effects and the nicotine is causing the addiction.

Although we don't have the same longitudinal studies that we do in tobacco smoking.

The fact that we were able to see flavor dependent responses in our cells at such low concentrations definitely suggests that we're moving towards an outcome that is just as bad, if not worse in the long term when it comes to vaping.