On this Giving Tuesday, we want to thank you for your partnership in the fight against the youth vaping epidemic. But in order to continue, we need your support. When we founded PAVe in 2018 while sitting around our kitchen tables, we intended to create an informational website about “JUULing”, never imagining that we were launching a grassroots movement of parents across the country joining together to take action against the predatory behavior of Big Tobacco.  Today, we’re battling to change the laws at the local, state, and federal levels, demanding that highly-addictive flavored e-cigarettes that the tobacco industry has used to target teens be taken off the market. PAVe parents testify in legislative hearings; write letters-to-the-editor; contact their elected officials; and lead educational webinars in their own communities. And we’re making real progress, with big wins in Massachusetts and California—which have banned all flavored tobacco products — and in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, which have outlawed sales of all flavored e-cigarettes. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, we celebrated similar victories in Missoula, Montana and Loveland, Colorado. In the coming year, we will redouble our efforts to pressure FDA to do what it should have done long ago: ban all flavors and strictly regulate the vaping industry.  But most importantly, we offer resources for the thousands of parents who reach out to us as they struggle to deal with the consequences of their children’s severe nicotine addiction caused by a dependence on flavored e-cigarettes. Parents like Donna, a single mom in Maryland whose 16-year-old son Jacob, an A-student and star athlete, began suffering panic attacks at school and didn’t have the lung capacity to finish a lacrosse game. Or Candy, a Florida nurse whose son Walker vaped mango pods and became severely ill, spending almost six months in the hospital. He now awaits a lung transplant. And Tylise, a Michigan high-school teacher who realized her students couldn’t sit through an entire class without a trip to the bathroom to get their nicotine fix. She came home from work one day to discover that her own daughter was similarly addicted. There is so much more work that needs to be done because this epidemic is far from over. The latest federal figures report that 3.6 million teens are regularly vaping and that over the last year teen use of new flavored disposable products like Puff Bar, Stig, Myle and thousands of others has grown by 1000%. In fact, as New York Times health writer Jane E. Brody reported just last week, experts are concerned that "'We're stepping backward from all the advances we made in tobacco control.'" We need your help to continue our work that is made even more urgent by the pandemic: a recent Stanford-led study has shown that teens who vape are 5-to-7 times more likely to contract COVID. Please donate to PAVe today so parents like us can keep fighting to protect all of our kids. Big Tobacco isn’t going anywhere. But neither are we. |
