Teenagers using e-cigarettes to vape pot, US study says

WORRYING TREND: High-school students were 27 times more likely to use electronic cigarettes to vaporize cannabis than adults who use e-cigarettes

Reuters, NEW YORK





Nearly one in five high-school students who said they used electronic cigarettes to vaporize nicotine also used them to vaporize pot, according to a survey of nearly 4,000 Connecticut teenagers.

The study, published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first evidence that teenagers are using electronic cigarettes to vaporize cannabis, the researchers said.

The paper by Meghan Morean of Oberlin College in Ohio and her colleagues raises concerns that the rising popularity of e-cigarettes may encourage teenagers to use the devices to vaporize cannabis, potentially exposing them to higher concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

“Forms of cannabis that can be vaporized, like hash oil, can be many times stronger than marijuana that is smoked,” Morean said in an e-mail.

A study released last month suggested US teenagers who try e-cigarettes might be more than twice as likely to move on to smoking conventional cigarettes than those who have never tried the devices.

According to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, about 2 million middle and high-school students tried e-cigarettes last year, triple the number of teenage users in 2013.

Morean and her colleagues found that of students who had used e-cigarettes, 18 percent had used them to vaporize cannabis in some form, including hash oil and wax infused with THC.

High-school students in the study were 27 times as likely to use e-cigarettes to vaporize cannabis as adults who use e-cigarettes, the researchers said.

Male and younger students were more likely to vaporize cannabis than female and older students, but socioeconomic status was not a factor. Use differed among the five schools involved, possibly because of different policies.

While the findings were limited to Connecticut schools and might not apply to states with varying cannabis laws, the pattern is worrisome, Dustin Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at the Geisel School of Medicine in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, said by e-mail.

Lee was not involved in the study.

“We know very little about the acute and long-term effects of high-potency THC on neurobiology and behavior,” Lee said.

“This is especially concerning for teens, who are in a critical time for development of brain structures that are integral in executive functioning,” he added.