Confronting The Vaping Epidemic With Matt Bellace, PhD

Maybe you’ve seen young kids doing it — and maybe you wished you had more definitive information about the ways in which it’s a health risk.  There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and we’re here to cut through the clutter.

In this 3-minute video, PhD and Comedian Matt Bellace lays out the truth about vaping and encourages the younger generation ‘not to be the experiment’ in big tobacco’s newest effort to sell harmful products.

Vaping… it’s more popular than ever.

More and more kids are doing it, and so more and more teachers and parents are looking to Natural High to provide helpful facts on the vaping epidemic.

We’re often asked if vaping is ‘safer’ than smoking. This is an important question, and we’re here to help answer it.

First, while vaping exposes users to a smaller number of harmful chemicals than cigarettes, that doesn’t mean it’s safe.

According to studies from John Hopkins University, “emerging data suggests links to chronic lung disease and asthma. You’re exposing yourself to all kinds of chemicals that we don’t yet understand and that are probably not safe.”

Additionally, there has been a recent outbreak of lung injuries and deaths associated with vaping. As of January 2020, the CDC confirmed 57 deaths in patients with e-cigarette or vaping, product use associated lung injury.

These deaths have mostly occurred in people who have modified their vaping equipment, or used vaping products containing cannabis or THC.

Vaping is also nicotine-based, just like cigarettes. So that means vaping is just as addictive as cigarettes are. In fact, if vaping machine voltage is modified, vaping can deliver more nicotine than smoking cigarettes.

While vaping is a new phenomena and not all the facts are in, we want you to be prepared to speak to your kids about it. It helps to give kids some context, which is why we released this video about vaping.

Natural High, a prevention of drug abuse non-profit, wants you to have the most current prevention information in your toolkit. We want you to be able to speak definitively with the kids in your life about real issues and to give them the skills they need to make the right choices.

That’s why we produced this short video about the risks of vaping. In it, PhD and Comedian Matt Bellace lays out the truth about vaping and encourages the younger generation ‘not to be the experiment’ in big tobacco’s newest effort to sell harmful products.

If you’d like to access the associated discussion questions and activities, login at NaturalHigh.org and find Matt Bellace in the Featured Storyteller section of your dashboard. Click here to immediately access the discussion questions, activities, and our library of 40+ Storytellers.