First time when I vaped I was in sixth grade.

I was 12 years old.

I was 14.

I was nine years old.

15 when I first tried a vape.

13 years old.

12 years old.

Ten.

Nine years old.

14 when I started.

About 11 years old when I started vaping.

My mentality was like I need nicotine.

If I don't have nicotine, I’m gonna be mad.

I can't live without it.

It's an addiction.

It was something that completely controlled me.

Vaping has become an epidemic here in Idaho.

We found it in the elementary schools, the middle schools, the high schools and college.

It's everywhere.

In 2007, e-cigarettes hit the US market and they were initially advertised as a way to quit smoking cigarets and they became this global hit.

Super fast.

Within a few years, multi-billion dollar global industry.

No science to back it up.

In 2015, Juul came on the market.

Juul made a product that was sleek, easy to hide, and they loved all the fruity fun flavors.

And that's when everything changed for youth vaping.

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.

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

I started getting shortness of breath, extreme chest pain.

I'd have to use my inhaler a lot more.

My lungs are hurting, can barely breathe in at all.

I can't breathe.

I can't breathe.

I could not breathe.

Vaping is damaging the lungs and you just started seeing a trend and these teenagers coming in and why they were coughing, why they were short of breath.

It ended up being the issue was the vaping.

Now it's almost tenfold.

It's doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

We deal with it with all the youth now.

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

If you vape one Juul pod that's equivalent to one pack of cigarettes.

That's a lot of nicotine.

Graduated for me from using it from my friends just to like hit it to getting my own, to having it on me 24-7.

I would vape every day.

Every chance I could.

Every hour.

Every 15 to 20 minutes.

I would wake up in the middle of the night, take a hit.

Most of the time it never left my hand.

There's not a specific type of kid that vapes.

I think it spans from rich, poor to athlete to honor role.

We are going to have this whole new generation that's addicted to nicotine, just like we did with conventional tobacco.

I went on Snapchat.

There was this one guy who his whole entire story was just posts of all these different boxes of different kinds of vapes and how they were super cheap.

These dealers, adults that are willing to sell to children are just selling them whatever they can get their hands on to get their money.

Even here on campus, I have tested a device and it tested to have fentanyl inside of it.

We have people who are dying from these things because they smoke something that they don't know what it is and potentially have an overdose.

The thing with the pod devices and disposables is they are like super easy to hide.

There's drawstrings, watches, pens, keychains, lipstick.

If you don't think your kid is vaping, think again.

40% of all kids in Idaho have at least tried it once.

I just hate it.

I just hate the vaping.

It got to a point where my husband and I purchased these alarm systems so we can hear when he opened his window because if he opened his window, that means he was doing something he's not supposed to be doing.

Some places I would hide ‘em, just put it right there, my blanket put it under my mattress, under this one or under the flat sheet.

Under my pants or in between them put it like right here on the back of it.

Conventional tobacco led to millions of people dying of lung cancer.

We now have the e-cigarette industry.

Same thing, multi billion dollar industry.

That's what we're up against.

There is quite a bit of catch up that needs to be done both within the medical community as well as the community at large about what vaping really is and the dangers of it.

If I could go back and take back what I did, I would have never vaped because everything negative that’s happened to me has started from vaping.

Now that I’m clean, I can start to rebuild that trust and trust is honestly one of the one of the biggest things in life.

There’s going to be a lot more challenges ahead.

And I’ll face those challenges.

Yep, and we’ll do it together.

I love you.

That's good.

Education is powerful.

Our kids are smart.

If we give them the education, they can use those tools to make better decisions.

It's much easier to prevent than to stop an addiction.