Experts fear e-cigarettes fuel teen addiction

San Jose: E-cigarettes can be an effective tool for smokers aiming to kick their tobacco habit, but officials fear the devices are also creating nicotine addiction among adolescents.
“E-cigarettes show tremendous promise as a tool for helping smokers who don’t respond to other approaches for quitting smoking,” Wilson Compton, deputy director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, said on Friday, during a presentation with other health officials.
“What concerns us is very recent data from the US showing surprising high rates of e-cigarette use by teenagers,” he said, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in California.
A recent annual survey of more than 40,000 US high school students showed that in the last month, 8.7 per cent of 14-year-olds had used the battery-operated devices that deliver vaporized nicotine into an aerosol inhaled by the user.
And the number only increased with age: 16.2 per cent of 16-year-olds and 17.1 per cent of 18-year-olds had done the same.