the Tobacco industry thrives on ensuring that you have new consumers for their deadly products, it includes to constantly expose young people to new products that contain nicotine. It helps young people to be lured into a lifetime of nicotine addiction, which is problematic when tonårshjärnan still under development. Access to new rökprodukter has literally exploded and resulted in a multi-annual reduction of tobacco use among young people in Sweden is now at risk of reversing – which has already happened in the united states.
Swedish tobacco prevention work among young people has focused on reducing the use of snus and the smoking of traditional cigarettes. This has led to smoking decreased among both students in grade 9 and grade 2 in high school, where the total proportion of smokers is 11% and 23% in 2018, a decrease by 3 and 5 percentage points since 2013 (CAN 2018). Overall, cigarette smoking in western countries has decreased. The tobacco industry is now developing new products and ways of exposing young people to nicotine at an age where the risk of a lifelong addiction to nicotine is extremely high.
and , secondly, several generations of the that are loaded with e-liquid and secondly, those that are loaded with dry products, such as tobacco, herbs, or cannabis. These are termed Heat note burn products. The tobacco companies are investing large resources to develop its variant of these so-called HNB-products. Officially the products are intended for adults. However, they are designed both in appearance and in terms of the seasoning to appeal to young people. The products are marketed cleverly in social media, and bypasses the restrictions that will discourage young people from taking up smoking.
In a Dutch study of adolescents who had never smoked cigarettes increased the risk tenfold, to start on the first tested the e-cigarettes.
We have seen in recent years the smoking of shisha and e-cigarettes among young people is increasing. In the study we conducted, ”Waterpipe use in adolescents in Northern Sweden: the Association with mental well-being and risk and health behaviours” , funded by the Folkhälsomyndigheten and published in Scandinavian journal of public health, we asked over 1000 middle and high school students about their smoking habits in relation to other risk behaviour and health.
In year 3 at upper secondary school answered six out of ten ever tried cigarettes. Almost as many responded that they have tried snus, or water pipe, and a quarter that they smoked e-cigarettes. 11 percent of students said that their parents would allow that they smoked cigarettes compared with 21 percent for snuff, 17 per cent for e-cigarettes and 22 per cent for the hookah.
An american compilation of the scientific literature confirms that young people who start smoking e-cigarettes have a significantly greater future risk to even try cigarettes.
in Addition to the parents were more permissive towards new rökprodukter in our Swedish study, perhaps because the risks are less well-known, considered the young people to cigarette and drug use was about 50 percent more harmful to health than e-cigarettes and hookah. Alcohol and snuff skattades as 10% more damaging. During a session with vattenpipsrökning, however, in itself a hundred-fold more nicotine and other toxic substances compared with the smoking of a cigarette. The young people in our study believed that it was more dangerous to be exposed to passive cigarette smoke than to smoking e-cigarettes and hookah.
Both Canada and the united kingdom have toned down the risks of e-cigarettes. However, you see the opposite in the united states. In the past year, according to the National youth tobacco survey, the use of e-cigarettes among high school students in the united states increased by 78 percent – to 3 million.
even more frightening is that the use among young people aged between 11 and 13 years of age has increased 48 per cent to cover 570.000 young people. The launch of the new rökprodukter has been so successful in the united states, the past trend of reduced tobacco smoking now recent years have turned with a 38-percent increase among high school students and 29 percent among the younger group. In Sweden, the proportion in year 9 who smoked e-cigarettes increased from 23 percent in 2014 to 32 percent this year (CAN 2018). For year 2 in high school, the corresponding figures are 24 per cent and 41 per cent, that is to say, a percentage in line with what is observed in the united states.
The u.s. government notes with great concern the tobacco flavoring of the products, or something that attracts the group of young people, not least to minorities and vulnerable groups. Additives of different flavors, and cooling of the smoke – which takes place in the hookah when the smoke passes through the water – make to pulmonary defense against smoke is reduced and the smoke penetrates deeper which increases both the risks of damage, and uptake of nicotine and other products in the blood.
Recently reported, dr. Stanton A Glantz and his colleagues at the University of California-San Francisco that the risk for heart attack doubled in adults who smoke e-cigarettes. Those daily smokes both cigarettes and e-cigarettes have a femdubblad risk.
When we in our study asked young people why they tried hookah for the first time accounted for over half that they were curious, and 25% to his friends smoked. We further found that young people who smoke e-cigarettes significantly more often polydrug users, of different smoke – and nicotine products, feel worse, have more difficulty to concentrate and sleep worse. We also saw that the fewer planned to read further on the university and college. E-cigarette smokers, however, is more active on social media and perceive themselves as more popular. What comes to attitudes of view, about 60 per cent of the young people that cigarettes should be banned, compared with 40 percent for snuff, but only 25 per cent for e-cigarettes, and 20 percent for the water pipe.
It is now high time to find out how rökbeteendet among young people in Sweden are affected by the tobacco industry’s ingenious marketing of the new rökprodukter. We urgently need to develop strategies to counteract the worrying developments with regards to the intake of new rökprodukter. Decision-makers who, by law, can counteract the deluge of new rökprodukter that takes hold among young is a step after. Action must be taken. Sweden, with its folkhälsofokus can become a leader who reverse the trend and strengthen young people’s resistance to new rökprodukter.
