Israel’s Rise in Vaping Has Me Worried as a Parent

Vaping is taking the world by storm. Seen as a healthier alternative to smoking, vaping is starting to pick up steam even in Israel. I’ve been to enough gatherings and parties to see the shift from cigarettes to vaporizers with my own eyes.

You’ll find many trying to conceal their habit.

And with Dab pens and small vaporizers, it’s easy for people, young and old, to hide their habit from the world. The lack of a smell also makes it easy to vape without alerting everyone in the room. School students in the United States have even started vaping in classrooms.

Teachers can’t smell the vapor, and when their backs are turned, it’s easy for kids to vape without being detected.

I fear that many Israeli teens will follow in the same footsteps as their American counterparts. Juul, a popular e-cigarette, is now debuting in Israel and will have no restrictions. This is a concern for me as a parent because Juul is what many American teens choose when trying to hide their habits from their parents.

Why is Juul bad for kids?

It’s not a normal e-cigarette that has a range of 5 milligrams of nicotine to 30 milligrams of nicotine. Juul breaks the barriers, offering 59 milligrams of nicotine for every mL of liquid. That’s a massive amount of nicotine.

Banned in Europe, Israel’s Health Ministry has allowed Juul to enter the market without opposition or regulation. Juul’s high nicotine content has led to it booming in the United States, taking over half of the market share when compared to 500 competing brands.

Nicotine in itself is a concern because it’s highly addictive and has negative health impacts in high dosages. Juul’s high nicotine count makes the e-cigarette more addicting, but it’s the design of the brand that’s really a concern. The device is designed to be concealed, and it’s the same device behind the rise of vaping in the middle of classrooms.

Parents and teachers don’t realize that students have the Juul device and are smoking in the middle of class.

Europe banned the Juul because the nicotine content exceeds the 20-milligram limit in e-cigarettes. A single Juul pod contains as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes, and for anyone that is using an e-cigarette, this means that you are: four times more likely to smoke cigarettes.

The high nicotine count leads to many adolescents smoking traditional cigarettes.

It’s a major risk, and the Juul trend is going to be allowed in Israel without any regulation at all. And if you go back to last year, you’ll find that Deputy Minister Yaakov Litzman, stated that e-cigarettes would have the same rules imposed against them as regular cigarettes.

Juul has made it a point to not promote their products to kids under the age of 18, but by law, there are no restrictions in place. It’s legal to sell e-cigarettes to children in Israel. Advertisements can also be geared towards younger audiences without issue.

Vaping also has potential health risks, with one teen suffering from “wet lung” just weeks after she started vaping. The teen went into respiratory failure, required breathing machines to keep her alive and had to have tubes inserted in her chest to drain the fluid that collected in her lungs.