Vaping seems like a tame variety of vice, a novelty of our time, like pipe smoking.

Back in the distant year of 1979, 17- and 18-year-olds smoked cigarettes and marijuana, crossed into Jersey to legally drink beer and hard liquor, and had plenty of sex. Sometimes all in the same night.

About half of these long-ago teens had their driver’s licenses at the tender age of 16. Among those who also had part-time jobs, which was most, they could purchase, for a reasonable price, an aging muscle car. Maybe a 1970 Chevelle SS 454 with 360 horsepower which, legend had it, could roar from 0-60 in six seconds. No air-bags. No one wore seat belts. Fun.

How did parents deal with this alien world of sex, drugs and rock ’n roll, of fast kids and faster cars?

They worried, no doubt. Maybe they had some sleepless nights wondering where junior was at 3 a.m., for which there would be consequences. And there should have been. This was a time before cellphones. Tracking down a teenager at that hour usually required dead-of-night phone calls to the parents of junior’s friends, or to hospital emergency rooms, or to the cops.

Eventually, junior rolled in and was punished — grounding was popular — and (usually) he never crossed the old man again.

By today’s standards, it’s nuts to think that responsible grownups gave teenagers that much freedom, and the knife-edge danger that came with it.

But those of us who were teens back then turned out OK. Most of us, anyway. Teen marijuana enthusiast Barack Obama, who graduated from high school in 1979, became our 44th president.

Which is why I can’t get worked up about vaping, the latest teen crisis according to experts, school officials and PTO-types who wring their hands raw.

Vaping is a fairly new vice. The vapee inhales a nicotine-laced liquid which is heated in a small device sometimes called an e-cigarette. The liquid is flavored (one fruity offering is called “Unicorn Puke”). I’ve never vaped, but I suppose vaping delivers the same relaxed sense that we ex-smokers looked forward to each we lit up a Marlboro or Newport, so I get it.

But locally vaping is big, and no one seems to know why. As we reported in Sunday’s editions, a Pennsylvania Youth Survey shows 19.5 percent of Bucks County school students vaped in the last 30 days. Among high school seniors, 37.2 percent vaped over the last month. That’s double the national average of 17 percent. (In Montgomery County it was 32.3 percent.)

Vaping’s health effects are largely unknown. A report this year by the National Academy of Sciences shows vaping has no long-term health conditions. However, it may contribute to a temporary condition called “wet lung,” whose symptoms include coughing, wheezing and chest pain.

Beyond that, experts say addiction to nicotine is the most serious side effect, along with using the e-cig device to smoke cannabis. There is also the danger of inhaling tiny metal particles from the heated coil.

Schools have geared up to deal with it, experts have been consulted and students have been called to school assemblies to discuss its dangers.

“If we have young men and women feeling the need to vape frequently during the day, that is a problem. As a community, we need to talk about it,” Abram Lucabaugh, assistant high school superintendent in Central Bucks School District.

While I'm sure parents appreciate the superintendent’s concern, pardon me, but it sounds like the making of a hysteria. Not to dismiss legit health concerns, but in 1979, more than half of U.S. 12th graders said they had smoked weed, a high-water mark in casual drug use never reached since. That was a crisis.

Now, kids consume vape juice with names like “fruit medley” and “crème brulee.” The alarms seem contrived, and it seems like vaping is getting the “Reefer Madness” spin.

I've heard the gateway drug argument, that vaping leads, somehow, to deadly opioids. That’s a stretch. Not everyone who smoked weed or drank at 18 in New Jersey 40 years ago became a drunk or addicted.

Vaping seems a fairly tame vice, a novelty of our time. There is only one item that should cause great concern for parents of teenagers, something that parents in 1979 didn't have to worry about: legal fun weed.

Legalizing recreational marijuana, instead of decriminalizing it, will have a more devastating impact on the health and the well-being teenagers than all the Unicorn Puke Bucks County. That's because when recreational marijuana is legal, kids who otherwise would never have tried it will indulge. Some of them will have their lives altered for the worse.

School districts should be sounding alarms on that one. So far, I haven’t heard much.

JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.