 This is Friday, February 11th. This is the Senate Finance Committee. And first item on the agenda is our voices exposed. It's a youth group from Chittenden County. No, okay. We are of the X Twin Valley. We are from the Wyndham County. Wyndham County, okay. I believe they contacted me several months ago. And we've been, they have a youth day at the state house. And we've been trying, normally we'd have them in the committee room, but the Senate is still virtual. So we have them on Zoom and introduce ourselves. I'm Senator Ann Cummings from Washington County. Senator, I'm gonna go as you're on my screen. So I've got Michael, you're next. Michael Sorokin from Chittenden County. Mark. Senator Mark McDonald from Orange County. Okay, Randy. Senator Randy Brock from Franklin County. Ruth. Hi, thanks for being with us. I'm Senator Ruth Hardy from the Addison District. And Chris and then Chris Pearson and Chris, we got P and B if they do it in school. So Chris. Pearson. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Chris Pearson from Chittenden County. Great to have you with us. Okay, and the remaining Chris. Uh-oh, the remaining Chris. The remaining Chris is Chris Bray from the Addison Senate District. And I live in Bristol, thanks. So welcome. It is Friday. We have had a long week, a lot of it talking about student waiting, which you may find interesting at some point. And it is Friday and we get a little relaxed, I guess, by Friday, letting off a little steam before we start. So I will turn this. I've got Shelly's name up. Shelly, the floor is yours, and I will let you tell us what you think we should know, okay? All right, my name is Catherine Thomas. And this is Callie Molo. We both attend Twin Valley Middle High School in Whitingham, Vermont. We want to talk to you guys a little bit today about teen vaping and teen nicotine use. We are from Our Voices Exposed, which is a Vermont organization of teens against tobacco and nicotine products. Who do you want to? Let's go to this one. Let's finish off with that one. Let's start with the ads. So basically we've been seeing a lot of ads online in social networking apps. And I've seen a lot of ads on Instagram talking about promotions for companies like Wish and AliExpress, which are companies who are not regulated and they don't ID for any kinds of substances. But I've seen a lot of prevention ads on Snapchat. Okay, I believe we outlawed selling vapes online. Yes, those third party sellers, they are mostly based overseas. They do sell counterfeit and black market vapor products. We ran into this with cigarettes. We fondly called them Ho Chi Minh cigarettes. They came in from overseas and were very difficult to regulate. And we do have some examples, those advertisements, if you would like. Sure, if you can email, do you have them to put up now or you could? Yes. Okay, that's great. It says that screen sharing is disabled. Faith, can you allow them to screen share? It's now enabled. It is enabled. Thank you so much. Let's just pull that up. Shelley, do you have that? Is it your side? Yeah, sorry about this, technical difficulties. It happens to everybody. There it is. Fixing it then I am. There we go. Can you kind of just focus on your, we've got your side screens too, I think you can focus that so we just see the ad. Just put this into. Go with where you are. All right, so this is the Alliexpress. And here is another Alliexpress ad. This is all based overseas and a lot of the comments and reviews that I saw on this were things like tastes good, worked and most importantly, the most asked question was, do they ID at the door? And the answer to that is no, because there's no way of knowing that there's a vape in there because the package is all discreet. And so you get an envelope and nobody knows what it is. Okay. And these are some of the most popular vapes that we've seen in school. This is the Hyde Edge. It is a square disposable vape. Disposable vape show the most popular kind right now. Jewels are not cool anymore. And neither mods they haven't been for a few years now. Have some physical models if you would like to see those. Um, would you like to see those on camera? Committee, yeah, if you've got them and you would like us to see them, that's fine. Okay. So these are some of our Jed confiscated models through the Gearsfield Valley Community Partnership. We've got things like this. Okay. I think you have to take your screen down because we can't really, everybody can't see you when we screen cherry. There we go. Now they can see you. So we have got some packaging. Okay. It does have the contained nicotine, but it has like a cute little picture all over the mod. And this one is, this one is Kang vape and it is yellow breeze. So that's what that looks like. And kids can just kind of hide it like this and like use it. And that's fairly large. This is one of the bigger chunkier ones as well. Strawberry flavored. But again, very easy to like if you have a baggy sweatshirt on. And then you just toss it out and your parents don't know because you don't have that jewel piece to charge with a mod. This is the smallest one so far that has been confiscated. And you can just really have them disposing as well. There's also no way to dispose these safely. They are hazardous waste. So when teachers confiscate these, they just have to put them in a drawer and they don't know what to do with them. And then once they're in that drawer, kids will more than likely find a way to go back in and just take it back or take back somebody else's. Maybe they'll find a flavor that they like better. Okay. There's a big culture of sharing. So like if I were to have this, half the school would have used it. That sounds healthy in day of pandemic. Yup. The retail price of one of these is about $10 for, they usually advertise how many puffs. So like this one has almost 2,000 hits, meaning that you can suck on this 2,000 times and you will get nicotine for $10. And whereas jewel is now almost $100 to start. I know this because my parents tried it once and hated it. But kids, because of the price rise, don't do it anymore. They went for the cheaper disposable alternative. As there is a lot of vaping still going on in schools. Yes. Yeah. And it's hard to figure out, my family has used vaping as a way to quit smoking. And it's hard to find out how to keep it away from young people while allowing the people who want to quit and our adults to smoke you so safely. That's been an issue we've kind of grappled with is how do you do that? And we have one idea if you'd like to share it, Hallie. So we currently have four prevention programs in our school and those are VCAT, which is remote kids against tobacco. ATI, which is above the influence. OVX, Our Voices Exposed and Pride, which is a community partnership, which is basically just all drugs preventing them. So we were just thinking about more funding for preventing for prevention programs. Okay. I believe more funding will be coming ironically when we legalize cannabis, but... Okay. It's one of those things, but a good portion of the money from cannabis is going, and I'm looking at Senator Pearson who has been following this closely for the committee. It is going to prevention, right Senator? So there should be more prevention I believe some of it's going to after-school programs thinking that if kids have constructive things to do, they might be less inclined to start vaping at an early age. Probably won't do after-school for high school, but maybe up through middle school. And we'll see what do you see works as prevention? What do you see works as prevention? Definitely activities, things to keep kids busy because a lot of people that go out and get high just say, I was bored. It was something to do. So having something that gives them a sense of purpose and makes them feel good that isn't drugs would be really important. Okay. We talk a lot about anxiety and coping. Yeah, a lot of people use nicotine specifically for a coping mechanism for things like anxiety and depression brought on by the pandemic. So funding for prevention programs would definitely, it would definitely be useful to kind of focus on mental health as well. Actually, two of us spent this morning in health and welfare, Senator Hardy and I, talking about mental health programs and specifically youth services and youth mental health programs. So anything you'd like to, you can email any thoughts you might have to either myself or Senator Hardy or all you've got faith, these faiths email send them to her and she'll send them on because we know these things are all interlocked and they have been, but, and we also know that COVID has made it worse for people. So, Senator Sorokin, you have a question. Yes, thank you for coming. Do you have a ballpark figure of how many students in your high school vape on a regular basis? I would say probably half and half, like half do, half don't. I know probably like 70% have tried it. Right. But on a regular basis, probably like half and half. And do you feel like it's a gateway to cigarettes? No, God, no. A lot of the students that I see vaping, if you ask them about cigarettes, they're like, that is the most disgusting thing on the planet, I would never do that because it makes your clothes smell and it burns more. And because the campaign against cigarettes was going on for so long, kids think it's gross because they've heard so much, so young that there's all the chemicals and stuff in it. So we failed in our attempts to let them know that there are equally bad, if not worse, chemicals in some of the vapes. And I assume the ones that are coming unregulated from overseas, we have no idea what's in there. My friends and I joked that there was pee in them. That's possible. It is. Talk about the education. They are unregulated. And there are some kids that do want to quit, but it's really hard because of the higher nicotine content in vapes than there is in cigarettes. I don't know how much prevention will work for kids like me who are already 18 and have already made their decision. But I think coming through the next generation and really educating the younger people and just having it be a common part of culture that vapes are not healthy will be really important in prevention. Okay, so we need to start early. Once you're in high school or middle school, it's too late. Yes. It's really interesting to me that your reaction to cigarettes was visceral in how disgusting it was, yet the same stuff is in vapes and people don't know it. Or they've already started, so they don't care. And they smell good. The biggest part for a lot of people, a lot of kids my age were always taught how horrible cigarettes were right from the time we were in kindergarten. And they were smelly and kids who smelled like cigarettes were gross. And that was a big culture shift from previous generations. And it put most kids off from smoking. I only know one child in the entire school of 200 who has even tried to cigarette. Wow. Okay, so prevention does work. Yes. Now we've got to figure out how to do that with vapes. Yeah. Okay, Senator Bray. Well, thank you again for coming. It's great to hear from people who are in a part of the world that the rest of us aren't necessarily every day. So the question I have is the vapes that we were talking about that you were showing us, are they being shipped from overseas or they originate overseas and they're being purchased from a US store? Even if it's mail order, it's being shipped from somewhere in the United States. A lot of vapes like these have not been shipped. A lot of parents think that this is healthier than cigarettes. So they will say, I'd rather you do this than go smoke a cigarette. It will kind of condone that behavior. And I know that there are a few places locally that I've heard do not ID. But do not what please? Do not ID, they don't make you show your ID. Okay, so do you have any sort of ballpark sense of how many people buy from an online store versus it's pretty much out in the open? You're picking it up in a local store? I think most kids in the school pick it up locally or have their parents pick it up. Or friends. Or other friends and then it's sold in between because friends will sell the friends for a lower price and then they'll both share it. Well, I mean, everybody will share it, but. Okay, well, Senator Pearson and I were talking, I don't know, it feels like it was pre-pandemic, I think two years ago, maybe more about different ways to not have vapes become litter, basically, you know, problematic trash. And so one possibility was having a deposit on them. If there were a deposit on them, do you think people would bring them back? I know that's speculation on your part, but if we're looking for a way to manage that as a kind of waste problem. It was a high-end deposit. I think people would, yes. I think people would definitely drop it off or have parents drop it off if they didn't wanna get caught. Because it is a pain to like, I mean, most kids will just throw it in the garbage, I'm sure, which is not safe because there's a live battery in there that could explode at any moment. I do see a lot of them on the sides of the roads, like right now, I'm sure if I were to go down in Mount Snow, which is the most local city near us, I could find a bunch of them on the side of the road. Okay. Well, thank you for that. Okay, thank you. We are running out of time. So this has been very helpful. And any thing you can think of that would be effective in prevention programs, if the best place would be either to send it to me or to Senator Hardy. And we all have the same emails. I'm A Cummings at leg.state.vt.us. And she's our Hardy. We all have our first initial last name and the at is all the same. And it's on, if you go to the Statehouse website, you can find any of us. So that would be helpful. Senator McDonald has a question before we sign off. As a former eighth grade teacher, I'm curious to know what grade level our witnesses are today. I am a high school senior. I'm 18 years old. I'm a high school sophomore. I'm 15 years old. Well done. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Okay, thank you.