As you walk across the parking lot after school you may hear a distant cry, “hey kid, why don’t you come on over and take a chuck?” Don’t even hesitate to run away as fast as you can. Vaping, or ‘chucking’ for slang, is a new craze that all the kids are doing now a days. This less dangerous, but far from safe, alternative to smoking has become more than just a hobby to some, it’s become a lifestyle.

Vaporizer pens come in all different shapes and sizes with a variety of different prices and all different sorts of bells and whistles. The E-juice enters the ‘chuck’ through either the top or bottom of the tank. Using adjustable wattage output, the ‘chuck’ vaporizes the juice into a thick, venomous, cloud that you inhale into your lungs. You then exhale the deadly cloud of thick vape smoke.

Yes vaping is an alternative to smoking cigarettes but most teens didn’t even smoke before they started sucking on these devices. Chemicals in the vape can damage lung tissue, provoking inflammation. That damage can reduce the ability of the lungs to keep out germs and other harmful substances, new studies show.

The juices these pens use still contain nicotine. Mitch Zeller, director of The Center for Tobacco Products, exclaimed, “I can say definitively, that nicotine is harmful to the developing teenage brain. And no teenager, no young person, should be using any tobacco or nicotine-containing products.”

One hundred percent of people who vape will die at some point in their life, possibly as a result of lung damage or infections related to vaping; these facts are irrefutable and don’t stack up in favor of the vapors. The next time some challenges you to a cloud of (seeing who can blow a bigger cloud of poisonous vape smoke), remember that there are dangers associated with vaping, many of which are unknown to us at this point. People used to think cigarettes were safe too.