There’s a good chance you’re flipping through this magazine with one hand and holding a vape in the other. Even if you do Pilates, drink ceremonial-grade matcha, and have a five-step skincare routine, you might go through multiple disposable vapes a week. When Juul first launched, in 2015, every teenager wanted a hit. The bathrooms at my high school became markets for mango and crème brûlée pods. My classmates posed for Snapchat stories with the sleek USB-like device, exhaling clouds of smoke from softly parted lips. By 2019, teen vaping had reached its peak: 27.5 percent of high schoolers were doing it.
Just over a decade later, vaping is not the flex it once was. “That vaping-is-cool vibe ended when I was, like, 14,” says Liam, a 17-year-old high school senior from Washington, D.C. Online, there’s a new genre of videos about how embarrassing nicotine addiction feels, how it’s absurd to be “controlled by a stick” or “addicted to fruit-flavored plastic.” In a viral clip, a podcaster discussed feeling ashamed about how she was “going to be 45 years old, with a child, smoking my vape.” We all know the drawbacks—vaping is expensive, exposes us to toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde, can damage our lungs, and is super addictive. The desire to free ourselves has never been stronger: This year, 67 percent of nicotine users between the ages of 18 and 24 plan to quit, according to Truth Initiative, an anti-smoking nonprofit. And yet more than half who try end up failing. If vaping is cringe, why can’t we stop?
Going cold turkey is appealing: a sudden, immediate start to a nicotine-free life. But only 5 percent are likely to succeed that way. “Quitting unassisted, with no support, is the most common way,” says Megan Jacobs, the senior vice president of product at Truth Initiative. “It’s also the most miserable and ineffective.” Part of the challenge is nicotine withdrawal, which can be brutal. The addiction is both physical and psychological, so you might be irritable and anxious, or have headaches and trouble sleeping, prompting you to reach for the vape. “What makes people fail almost every time is fear and shame,” says Manuel Carrazana, a physician and medical adviser on the telehealth platform Sesame. He says “small, winnable goals,” like celebrating every vape-free day, can be much more effective than an all-or-nothing ultimatum.
Vaping was initially marketed as a tool to quit cigarettes. The fashion designer Marc Jacobs was a five-packs-a-day cigarette smoker for decades, and he managed to kick the habit with vapes. Now, however, some teenagers are using cigarettes to wean themselves off vapes. Cameron, a recent college graduate, says many of her wellness-oriented friends have swapped their Elf Bars for old-fashioned Marlboros. “Nobody’s posting with a Juul,” she explains. Their logic is that cigarettes are impossible to chain-smoke while you’re horizontal in your bed, or in the bathroom between classes. As a result, you’ll hopefully end up smoking way less. Even if that’s true, it means being hooked on a different type of nicotine-delivery system—one with higher risks of cancer, heart disease, and respiratory issues—instead of swearing off the habit altogether.
Another popular swap is nicotine pouches, which are placed between your lips and gums and are more discreet and lung-friendly than smoking. Depending on the hour of the day, Liam is using a nicotine pouch, smoking a cigarette, or hitting the vape he’s “mostly” quit. He was recently diagnosed with a throat ulcer, which was affecting his voice. He believes it was caused by a “burnt, sketchy vape. It wasn’t until my singing teacher was like, ‘You have to quit’ that I was like, Okay, she’s probably right.”
These pouches are often framed as “productivity aids”—some tech companies even stock them in their offices—and they are largely undetectable once tucked into your gums. As a result, they’re omnipresent in school classrooms. Liam says his teachers don’t care. If they see someone using a pouch, “sometimes they congratulate you, because it means you’re quitting vaping.” But just like vapes and cigarettes, nicotine pouches are highly addictive. Plus, they tend to be much stronger. Liam uses Pablo (up to 24 mg of nicotine per pouch) and Iceberg (up to 70 mg). That means, depending on the brand, a single pouch can deliver more nicotine than a whole pack of cigarettes or some full Elf Bars. Caroline Vasquez Huber, the cofounder of Jones—a nicotine-replacement therapy startup that sells nicotine lozenges—warns against using pouches like Zyn in order to quit. “You get all the nicotine in the first 10 minutes of using a pouch,” she explains. “It’s absorbed really quickly. It spikes your blood nicotine levels and floods your system, so you crave more and more to get that same rush.”
Some young people, like Gigi Powers, a content creator and senior at New York University, are finding luck with a middleground approach to quitting. When Powers started interning at Jones last June, she was a vaper. Her friends constantly talked about quitting, though few actually did. “Deciding that you want to quit is the hardest part,” she says. Failure, after all, can be public: “You show up to the next party with a new vape, and everyone knows that you failed.” Ultimately, Powers quit by reframing slipups—such as vaping at a party, or buying a vape for a weekend—as just that: setbacks, rather than total failures.
Instead of relying solely on willpower, it helps if you have people around to hold you accountable. Tallulah Willis, a writer and an advocate for issues affecting young women (and daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis), vaped “every single day, all throughout the day, for 13 years.” She found that the hardest part of quitting wasn’t the cravings but the first “really, really bad day,” when she was overwhelmed and stressed but “had no release.” She posted her quitting process on social media to keep herself on track. Later, it felt great to tell everyone she hadn’t slipped. Getting rid of the “piercing bolt of panic when I lost my vape” felt pretty amazing too.
Lead image: Ed Templeton
