Brad Lamm - Quit Vaping: Your Four-Step, 28-Day Program to Stop Smoking E-Cigarettes

How to Change Someone You Love: Four Steps to Help You Help Them ( published in paperback as How to Help the One You Love: A New Way to Intervene and Stop Someone from Self-Destructing)

Just 10 Lbs.: Easy Steps to Weighing What You Want (Finally)

A new epidemic is killing people.

In America, the first death attributed to vaping occurred on August 23, 2019, in Illinois. The states department of public health announced the sad news, but in order to protect the persons privacy, officials didnt release the persons name, age, gender, or exact location. Since then, forty more people have died from vaping-related illness. The youngest was just thirteen years old, which underscores the devastating effects that e-cigarettes are having on teenagers. In fact, most victims of vaping-related illness are younger than thirty-five.

The media reports alarming stories, almost daily, about the vaping crisis. Damage to vapers lungs has become so prevalent that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has coined a new acronym for it: EVALI, or e-cigarette, vaping-associated lung injury. Instances of EVALI are surging. As of February 2020, the CDC has confirmed more than 2,700 cases of vaping-related lung injury in addition to the reported deaths.

After several days of high fever and flulike symptoms, people suffering from EVALI rush into emergency rooms with shortness of breath and difficulty breathing. One twenty-one-year-old man in Utah had such severe lung damage from vaping that even a ventilator couldnt help him breathe. Doctors had to connect him to a machine that pumped oxygen directly into his bloodstream to keep him alive. Closer examination of his lung fluid revealed that fat had clogged his white blood cellsnot from the chemicals that he had vaped, but likely from the breakdown of his own lung tissue. Doctors thought that he might die, but thankfully he survived and, after a two-week stay in the hospital, went home.

Vapers are dying, and their lungs are failing, but medical officials still dont know what lasting damage and other health problems vaping will cause in the long run.

So how did we get here?

It all starts with tobacco, a plant that contains large amounts of the nicotine chemical. The native people of Mesoamerica and South America discovered tobacco and the physical results of smoking its dried leaves, and Native Americans throughout the New World often used it in medical and ceremonial contexts. Europeans learned of it from them in the early 1500s and, from there, gradually introduced it to the rest of the world.

In 1559, Jean Nicotthe Frenchman from whose name the word nicotine derivesintroduced tobacco to France, and a dozen or so years later English explorers introduced it to their own homeland. Walter Raleigh brought samples from Virginias Roanoke Colony to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, but not everyone believed in this captivating new plant. In 1604, just one year into his reign, King James I of England called smoking tobacco a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

Despite those protestations, the burgeoning tobacco trade helped the English support Jamestown, their first permanent settlement in the New World. In 1612, John Rolfe became the first European settler in North America to grow tobacco as a cash crop, and the plant soon became known as the golden weed. King James I wasnt the only person who recognized the dangers of smoking this enticing new plant, however. Shortly thereafter, a sultan of the Ottoman Empire and an emperor of China both issued edicts banning smoking it. Powerful leaders knew centuries before the rise of modern medicine that smoking tobacco posed a major health risk to their people.

Lung cancer deaths related to smoking increased sharply in 1965 and continued through the 1990s. What was once touted as safe by doctors was killing untold numbers. The backlash against cigarette makers resulted in the Master Settlement Agreement of November 1998, brokered between the four largest tobacco companies in America and the attorneys general of forty-six states. Its stipulations included that those companies had to curb or cease certain advertising practices as well as to pay the states