FLORENCE, Ky. — The Northern Kentucky Health Department is disposing of vapes confiscated from students at local schools. This is part of an effort to not only be environmentally friendly but also to educate kids about the potential harmful effects that come from vaping.
As the department explained to Spectrum News, there’s been a lot of progress in that regard, but also still a lot of work left to do.
Starting in August, NKY Health established vape disposal boxes in 17 of 18 Kenton County Schools.
The partnership has been an effort to help the district comply with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, a federal law that requires the proper disposal of p-listed hazardous waste when over 2.2 pounds have been collected.
Vaping devices confiscated from students fit that description.
“So that’s where our tobacco team stepped in, and we created our own protocol. We found a recycling center that will help us out,” said Casey Baker, substance use prevention health educator for NKY Health.
Baker said the vape disposal program isn’t just about helping the environment.
“We also are requiring the schools to let us know what kind of education they’re providing to the students. We just really want to make sure our northern Kentucky schools are providing evidence based programming. Just make sure the kids are getting what they actually need,” she said. “We want to make sure the students are actually getting some kind of education rather than just being sent home. Because most likely when they get sent home, they’re gonna be using the vapes or some kind of nicotine product.”
Just the first round of collection yielded 61 vapes confiscated from students.
“These were just vapes we were collecting from August from these schools. We found vapes in high schools. We also found them even in elementary schools,” Baker said.
She said at least half of them were THC vapes. A lot of the marketing, she said, is targeted at children.
“We have a hoodie that the strings are actually a vape themselves. There’s highlighters that are vapes. There’s little, looks like flash drives, USB drives that are vapes,” Baker said. “We found three of our vapes that looked like little teddy bears. There’s no way you can say that’s not meant for our kids.”
She said many of the health effects are still unknown.
“That’s the biggest issue we have right now is there’s not a lot of research on our long-term effects,” Baker said. “But likely what we’re going to see with the research is probably what we see with cigarettes. But short-term effects, we can already see people are having issues with breathing. The biggest concern we have with our kids is our brains aren’t fully developed until age 25. So any time you’re putting any kind of substance, like nicotine, inside of your brain, you’re changing the way that your brain is wired.”
The Kenton County School District sent Spectrum News 1 the following statement:
“The Kenton County School District has been collaborating with the Northern Kentucky Health Department to pilot the vape disposal program for the region. The district has a systemic and proactive approach to educate students on the dangers of vaping, and we implement appropriate policies and procedures when students are vaping on school grounds. While vaping is a concern for schools in our state, our region and here in Kenton County, it is important to note that the 61 items posted by the NKY Health Department represents about .5% of the district student enrollment. We will continue to educate our students on this very important topic.”
Baker said a youth tobacco survey showed a great decrease in the amount of children using tobacco products, which she said reinforces why this education is important, even as early as elementary school.
“It’s amazing to see a decrease, but it’s still happening. There’s still an epidemic occurring,” she said. “The thing is, it’s an addiction. And we need to think of this in the same way we treat any other type of addiction. We would treat people with compassion.”
She said nicotine can be even more difficult to quit than heroin. So the health department and its partners have their work cut out for them.
NKY Health offers two weeks of free nicotine replacement therapy, including patches, lozenges or gum, to anyone in Boone, Kenton, Campbell or Grant counties.