A vaping campaign aimed at teachers, not teenagers

**E-cigarettes have been the most commonly used tobacco product among US youth
since 2014.**

CDC launched Empower Vape-Free Youth in 2023, and the interesting decision
is in who it talks to.

**The campaign encourages middle and high school educators to speak with
students about the risks of e-cigarettes and nicotine addiction.**

Not the students. The teachers.

Why aim at the adult in the room

A campaign aimed at teenagers competes for attention with everything else
aimed at teenagers, and arrives from an institution with no standing in their
day. A teacher is already in the room, already has a relationship, and is
present at the moments when vaping actually comes up.

What such a person usually lacks is not willingness but material — what to
say, what the evidence is, and what to offer a student who wants to stop. So
the campaign supplies:

• Resources to help students avoid or quit vaping
• A fact sheet for educators on vaping and other tobacco product use
• Print resources, videos and social media assets, requestable from CDC's
  Media Campaign Resource Center

The phrase doing the work

**Educators can make a real difference by engaging in meaningful
conversations with their students.**

"Meaningful conversations" is the whole strategy, and it is a deliberate
contrast with the alternative a school reaches for by default — detection,
confiscation, suspension. A student caught vaping and punished has learned to
hide it. A student who talks to a teacher about quitting has somewhere to go.

Nicotine addiction is named alongside the health effects, which matters for
that conversation: a teenager who has decided the health risks are acceptable
has still not usually decided to be dependent.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.