Vaping is a wide-spread addiction that can affect everyone. Woodbridge Middle School is no exception to this pervasive problem sweeping across nations.

Vaping may be known for being better for the public than cigarettes, but experts would say otherwise. Vaping can actually cause many problems for the heart, lungs, and brain. More than 3.6 million middle and high school students were e-coverage (vaping)users, surpassing regular cigarettes.

Eighth grader Riley Volpe thinks,“more people should be informed and I think we should sue these companies for telling us its better but it’s worse.” Volpe is not the only pupil who has this opinion; math teacher Mr.Van commented, “People who are marketing are just trying to make money.” WMS eighth grader said,“I mean it annoys me; I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it pisses me off and companies are like, ‘hey try this’ and I am angry about it.”

WMS student parents were “mad and took away their phone” when finding out they had been vaping. The eighth grader feels that vaping is “bad” and peer-pressure has an effect on how many teens are vaping,“If you are with your friends and they’re vaping, of course you’re going to want to do it and the friends might be like ‘ewww’ you don’t do it, get out of here.”  Clearly there is an element of peer pressure that exists even in the WMS community.

Approximately 83.3% of students from an anonymous survey know someone under the age of eighteen that vapes. When it comes to vaping laws 50% of students feel the vaping should be illegal, 16.7% think it should be legal,16.7% wrote it should be legal for the right purposes, and 16.7% believe recreational vaping should be illegal, but if you vape to stop smoking, that should be legal.

Another student that took the survey wrote,“Vaping is the epitome of deceptive marketing. Teenagers are targeted by companies when it comes to vaping. They try and make vaping appeal to kids, and unfortunately they have succeeded.  Our society is blind to the tortures of vaping. For that reason, it is partly our fault for letting companies do this. It’s definitely part of the company’s fault too. However blaming companies for all of our problems get our society nowhere. We should focus less on who to blame, and more on how we can move forward.”

Vaping is caused due to many things like greedy companies, peer-pressure, and social media. Although this combination of contributors have made vaping the epidemic it is today, as the student above said, we should focus on how to fix this problem and not who or what to blame. The quandary of vaping will never be triturated, but we can try every day to contain this problem.