Jessica Moloney knows well the power that peer pressure and support can have on a teenager’s decision to keep vaping or quit.
As the team leader at Brophy Family and Youth Services based in Warrnambool, she has spoken with many young people about vaping.
Ms Moloney said that two years ago, most young people who came to the service were wanting help to get off alcohol or cannabis.
But she said now, vaping is the number one addiction on their books and most of the young people they talk to about vaping started through curiosity.
And for Ms Moloney, it has been a familiar line from many.
“Just sort of, ‘all my friends are doing it so I thought I’d try,'” she said.
‘Thankful for the friends who helped me’
Declan Hill, 15, started vaping as an 11-year-old when a friend told him he should try it.
“At the time I thought it would make me more popular but it really did not,” the Shepparton teen said.
“Peer pressure was one of the main reasons I started because at first I said ‘no’ because I did not really want to, but after he kept insisting and other people [were] telling me I should, I just gave in and had some.”
He stopped vaping about three months ago and said most of his friends helped him quit, giving him advice about what to do.
“Keeping your mind busy, keeping active and going out with mates helps a lot because you are not craving the nicotine,” he said.
“I’m thankful for those friends that helped me with that.”
Fellow Year 10 student at Shepparton Ace Secondary College Isabella Cartwright also started vaping around the age of 11, and recently quit as well.
She said it was very easy to get a vape.
“You can find them anywhere and everywhere,” she said.
“It is something that happens within friend groups that then turns to, ‘I’m going to try that’ and then it turns into an addiction.”
Peer pressure for good
In Warrnambool, Jessica Moloney said a lot of young people she spoke with about vaping tried it as an alternative to smoking cigarettes.
But just as peer pressure could hook young people into trying vaping, Ms Moloney said peer support could be crucial in helping them stop, by sharing information about the risks of vaping.
“If you have peers that can sort of learn the information and then feed it back to their peers as well, it is a more valid way of spreading information — if you hear it from people that you know and if it is based on facts and if it is based on evidence.
“We as drug and alcohol workers, we could work with the young people around providing them with the information that they can then go and share.”
Vaping costing schools thousands
A Victorian parliamentary inquiry into vaping and tobacco controls has heard some secondary schools had spent tens of thousands of dollars on vaping detectors.
Chief executive officer of Shepparton’s Primary Care Connect Trish Quibell told the inquiry’s Shepparton hearing that establishing vaping-specific peer support groups for teenagers would help address the crisis.
“We see there is a significant increase in the use of peer support workers or lived experience workers in adult [alcohol and other drug] services and in mental health services recently that are really positive.
“I don’t see why there is any reason you could not look at the same thing within an adolescent framework as well.”