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The Story
By the time I turned 16, I saw that many of my and my sister’s friends were vaping. By my senior year, I saw that one of my closest friends was severely addicted to nicotine and was even resorting to cigarettes when she didn’t have access to a vape. Now that I am in college, I see people vaping all the time, when they are walking to and from class, in the bathrooms, and especially at college bars and clubs. In highschool, my closest friends were not the type to ever vape, and I had previously thought that vaping was sort of dying off and becoming less cool. However, when I started college, I realized that the problem is much bigger than what I’d thought and witnessed in highschool. Seeing people my age vaping while walking around campus made me concerned about this dependence on nicotine and what impacts it might have on teen and young adult mental and physical health.
The Goal
What I want this website to achieve
Since this issue is so new, it is actively being researched and studied, “while it is well known that nicotine harms developing brains, including by making young people more susceptible to addiction, lesser known are the worrying connections between nicotine and mental health” (Truth Initiative, par. 3). I want this website to serve as a way to gently and respectfully warn people who are addicted to vaping nicotine about the potential mental health risks that it may inflict, and give them advice and resources that may help them quit or begin their journey to sobriety.