Lung association looking to expand P.E.I. youth anti-vaping campaign to Nova Scotia

While Nova Scotia banned flavoured vape products in April 2020 to reduce their appeal to young people, youth vaping remains a major concern in the province. 

According to Julia Hartley, director of operations for the Lung Association of Nova Scotia and P.E.I., over a third of high school-aged youth in the province have vaped in the last 30 days.

The organization has been running a campaign targeting youth vaping on P.E.I. that includes youth vaping awareness  days for Grade 7 at 19 schools across the island.

Hartley told CBC Radio's Information Morning Halifax host Portia Clark the association is looking to expand the program to Nova Scotia.

Their discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the state of youth vaping in P.E.I. and Nova Scotia? How many are doing it?

In P.E.I. we have about 40 per cent of youth vaping within the last 30 days at the high-school level and in Nova Scotia, it's slightly lower, but still very concerning. We have 37.1 per cent of Nova Scotia youth between high school grades 10 and 12 using e-cigarettes in the last 30 days.

These numbers keep on going up every time we get new data, so the lung association is very concerned.

Does that mean that they have tried it once or are they vaping consistently? 

The last 30 days denotes that it's a regular occurrence. It's something that they're doing on a regular basis. So it might not be every day, but typically it would be every week.

And what are they vaping?

Typically, nicotine. Even though there has been some legislation that's come out both in Nova Scotia and P.E.I., which we're very happy about — banning flavours, reducing the nicotine content — the vaping products still do.have pretty high levels of nicotine and we are still seeing quite a bit of flavoured vapes being used.

What gets them into it in the first place? Is it, as we might suspect, either peer pressure or peer influence from friends?

We have done some research over the last few years and found that 73 per cent of the youth that we surveyed back in 2019 in Nova Scotia stated that their strongest influence for starting vaping was friends.

Vaping is definitely quite different than smoking because it's a lot more socially acceptable within that demographic.

That's the strongest influence that we're seeing right now. We also found that flavours were a very strong driver to start vaping.

We had 95 per cent of the youth from Nova Scotia stating that they preferred vaping products. So it's really great we have these bans, but I still think that youth are getting these products either from the Internet or through social sourcing.

And so these vaping awareness days that you put on for grade 7 students on P.E.I., what did they involve in terms of educating them about the possible impacts of vaping?

The message for our youth is we're just trying to help better inform them about some of the health risks around vaping so that they can make an informed choice.

We did in-class presentations this year, so we recorded a video. They play the video and they have a really great discussion. 

You can hear what other kids are saying about vaping products and their take on it. And then we play some bingo games and just kind of try to help reinforce some of those concepts as well.

We try to involve the school in these vaping awareness days like the educators and the principals and the parents in the discussion.

This fall we did an evaluation at the end of each of our presentations and ... 75 per cent of youth were saying that after the presentation they felt that they were less likely to try vaping.

And now you're looking to expand this into Nova Scotia schools. Will there be things that you will change or do differently based on what's happened on P.E.I?

On P.E.I., we were really fortunate that we had some funding through our provincial government. We also have a really great partnership with the UPEI faculty of nursing. We don't really have those things established yet in Nova Scotia. 

We've adapted our video and we're going to put it up in the new year so that teachers and educators in Nova Scotia can deliver our program on their own, and we're hoping to build some more partnerships and get funding to roll it out.