Smoke or Vape?

Is vaping or smoking safer? The answer: neither.

Vaping is considered to be safer than smoking cigarettes, but it isn’t. Both vaping and smoking have negative side effects.  

According to Pam Cinadr, the school nurse at Pleasant Valley, “It will be easier to quit smoking while you are younger, rather than when you’re older and have been smoking for a few years. Spending $6.00 on a pack of cigarettes is a lot when you could be using that money to fill up your car.” Students should not put chemicals such as nicotine into their bodies in order to remain healthy.

Aside from harming one’s own body, smoking can cause serious health problems for others as well. Cigarettes can contain anywhere from 8 mg of nicotine to nearly 20 mg of nicotine. According to CDC.gov, “Not only does smoking have high amounts of this drug, but it’s also the leading cause to lung cancer, birth defects during pregnancy, and decreases your lifespan by an average of 14 years.” Smoking is something that is a serious problem in today’s society; and that needs to change.

Nicotine is a drug that can make one feel calmer when in a stressful situation. It is highly addictive and harmful to the body. When students are vaping, they are just substituting the nicotine by vaping instead of smoking a cigarette. Vaping is the process of taking in water vapor which has a flavored liquid that can contain nicotine.  

Neither smoking nor vaping have any benefits for a person’s personal health, but they both come with many harmful disadvantages. They can cause many problems, not only to one’s present self, but to their future self as well. Both smoking and vaping are becoming more and more of a problem in today’s society and can hopefully be changed.