Brian Cox reads “If I Must Die” by beloved Palestinian poet, teacher and martyr Refaat Alareer.

Refaat was killed on December 7th by an Israeli airstrike. This was the last poem he published.

“Luka Kinard knew his vaping habit was out of control when it started costing him $150 a week.“I was selling my clothes,” Kinard, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, said. “I would get shoes, sell them, go out get cheap shoes, sell them. I was doing anything and everything to get money.”His parents noticed when his grades started plummeting.

“He went from being a straight-A student to an F student,” Luka’s mother, Kelly Kinard, said. “(It was) a very rapid decline in grades. His behavior became explosive. He was very angry and it just wasn’t him.” Luka stopped his boy scouting activities, stopped fishing and spent all his time locked away in his room. He was vaping. 

Luka is part of what the Food and Drug Administration and the Surgeon General call an epidemic of e-cigarette use. And, as with most teens who are taking up the habit, it was the slender, easy-to-conceal Juul device that really got him hooked. 

Luka was hooked in a way that doctors never noticed before with regular cigarettes. “The flavor was better than the taste of a cigarette. Also the buzz was a lot better,” he said. But it was a pricey habit. 

“When I started spending $17 every four days or every day it was getting to a problem,” he said. “I realized (I was spending) $150 on pods in a week, and I noticed like this was getting out of control.” 

What brought matters to a head was when he had a seizure. “He was at his girlfriend’s house and an ambulance was called and he ended up in at the emergency room,” Kelly Kinard said. She knew it was the Juuling that had done it. 

“We followed up with the pediatrician, cardiologist and neurologist, and we couldn’t get anyone to listen to us when we told them the seizure was preceded by Juuling,” she said. “I found on the internet that it should be treated like a substance abuse issue. That helped when I called the insurance company and told them we need a referral for a substance abuse treatment.” 

The High Point, N.C. teen ended up spending 40 days in an addiction rehabilitation program before he was able to kick his habit. 

This makes sense to Dr. Sharon Levy, director of the Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction Program at Harvard Medical School. 

“We’ve seen a real influx in the number of phone calls that we’re getting for kids who need substance use evaluations and, remarkably, we’re seeing a big increase in the number of kids who are coming in specifically to be evaluated for nicotine and Juuling problems,” Levy told NBC News. 

“We’re seeing kids that seem to be getting a much higher nicotine level in their blood and that’s causing a completely different picture when they come in.” 

Other teams have found this, also, and the FDA is trying to crack down on sales of e-cigarettes to teens and young adults because they do deliver a much higher dose of nicotine than traditional burned cigarettes, Juul products, in particular, don’t offer a way to dial down the dose of nicotine-bearing vape fluid n the same way that other devices do. 

The extra hit of nicotine can have especially strong effects on young bodies, Levy said. 

“Kids are coming in with problems like difficulty in focusing, common symptoms of withdrawal, things like headaches, sometimes fatigue, stomach aches — which might be a symptom of nicotine toxicity or poisoning in some of them,” she said. 

“We’ve had kids who come in and say that they can’t concentrate in school, that they need to leave the classroom, they need to sneak out to the bathroom so that they can hit their Juul, or that they need to go to the nurse’s office because they just need to lie down,” Levy added. 

“That’s something we didn’t see in use of cigarettes. This is very concerning. This is really uncharted territory and we don’t know what use of nicotine in this way is doing to the developing adolescent brain.””

Continued in Link

TL;DR, vaping and juul’s really aren’t as harmless as a lot of people seem to think they are, in a lot of ways they can be more dangerous than traditional cigarettes. This article doesn’t even go into the way a lot of e-cigarette companies have been preying on vulnerable minority groups  that face higher levels of stress like the LGBT+ community and Native American reservations in their marketing. Like, taking advantage of stressed out vulnerable minority groups to sell them a toxic and dangerous way to temporarily relieve stress, but will eventually cause serious health problems for them, is actually pretty evil. 

Nicotine is addictive!

Nicotine is addictive!

Nicotine is addictive!!

It doesn’t matter that you don’t think you’re smoking because it tastes good and there’s less tar and contaminants - you’re still putting an addictive substance in your body over and over again. And this substance, nicotine, doesn’t just give you a buzz - it also constricts your blood vessels, causing less blood to go to your heart. Overuse can harden those vessels overtime and put your heart in overdrive, raising your blood pressure and causing heart disease.

No teenager or young adult should be essentially taking a dose of a drug that restricts your blood vessels every 30 minutes, 12 hours a day! If you took a shot of alcohol as frequently as you hit your Juul, we would recognize you as an alchoholic.

Stop using e-cigs! If you’re using them to quit smoking, you need to actually have a plan to quit the e-cigs as well.

Don’t give yourself heart disease at 16.

One of my teachers taught the gym/PE class. He told us about someone he knew personally, who nearly died to vaping. Breathing problems, the doctors couldn’t figure out why. Eventually they opened him up in surgery, so they could get an actual look, and found his lungs were a substance they likened to rubber. Like the soles of a shoe, or a tire. He had to get new ones, a transplant from others - I wasn’t told a price range for that, but I imagine it was debilitating debt for nearly anyone.

Vaping does horrible things to your body. The long-term effects have only begun to be observed, because of how new it was. I couldn’t tell you what chemicals did that; I’m no biologist, I don’t NEED to be a biologist to tell you that your lungs being unable to easily expand and contract and all the oxygenating parts withering away isn’t going to make you feel any better. Maybe your brain needs the hit right now, but lower the amount you’re taking. It’s better to go through this now, with help that’s readily available for addictions, than to die in your ‘20s to some chemical reaction that wasn’t monitored until it was already killing.

As just one data point, people who’ve deep cleaned computers belonging to vapers have all found some damn nasty-ass junk caked on the components. This can only be due to the residues from the vape smoke, since non-vapers don’t see this in their computers.

Now imagine that shit inside your lungs. Yes, your alveoli might filter it out but let’s be real, that shit staying around can’t be good.

Everyone's for equality. Until they're treated equally.

Let's have the conversation about UBI.

Let the actual data and facts end the bad faith arguments.

I was a participant of the now cancelled UBI pilot in Ontario Canada. I was happier, safer, was able to move and work at better jobs.

And oops there it is. Better jobs.

Better jobs

It's a class barrier. They need a poverty class to function

#people being able to leave jobs that maltreat them is a threat to capitalism

Being able to force every last job in existence to make itself sufficiently respectful, acceptable, and worthwhile to the worker that someone will choose to do it when NOT goaded by the threat of starvation is probably both the greatest positive effect UBI would accomplish AND the real reason it faces so much opposition.

This is horrible, tho. Imagine all the people who put such hard work into this show…only for it to a frigging tax write off.

And, yes, I know they all still got paid, but it must be so disheartening. Especially for all the child actors who had to take time off from school/leave home for a tv show they assumed would help their long term career.

Same thing happened to the lead girl from the Batgirl film. Her career was on the rise and she turned down a lot of other promising projects to do the film. And look how that worked out.