BROOKINGS – A public presentation on the impact of e-cigarettes and other vaping devices on communities and youth will be held from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday at Rotunda D at South Dakota State University.
The presented speaker is Officer Collin Smith of the Spearfish Police Department. He was named the 2016 Spearfish Police Department Officer of the year and has extensive knowledge on illegal vaping.
Smith said that in Spearfish, vaping has become a problem on an “epidemic” scale, with around 1 in 5 students vaping in some form, according to his estimates. The youngest person they’ve found with a vaping device was in the third grade.
“It’s truly an issue that we’re completely behind the curve on, and we are to the point where we’re playing catchup,” Smith said. Although more regulations have come, “it’s almost a case of being too little too late.”
According to national studies, e-cigarette use has increased 78 percent among high school students from 2017 to 2018. More than 3.6 million U.S. youth currently use e-cigarettes.
As Smith said, vaping is a fast-changing issue from year to year, and this presentation will help to provide a snapshot of how things are now.
In his presentation to members of the public, Smith will go over the dangers and health risks associated with vaping and its addictive properties.
“A lot of it is going to be the mechanics, just to get an idea of how these things work, the accessibility of it to the youth and how they’re getting it, and the addictive properties,” he said.
The idea is to get out into the community a notion of why vaping has become such a rising trend in teens. He’ll talk some on the regulations that have come about in regard to vaping and the FDA’s findings and stances on it.
The idea for this presentation started with an SDSU student taking classes for school counseling. At one of his classes, vaping came up as an area of concern for those students who had interned at schools. This student, a Spearfish native, had connections to the Spearfish Police Department, and so he was able to get Smith to lend his knowledge to both university students and the public.
Those connected to the university – namely those studying to become counselors or teachers – will have a separate presentation done earlier that day.
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
