Still, discontent among young people has been simmering. A year ago, Kamal Mazhar, now 17 and a high school senior in Virginia, walked into a school bathroom and found a dozen students jammed into two stalls, all vaping. In that moment, he says he realized vaping’s “ridiculous” spread, and grew frustrated by the lack of e-cig-focused prevention efforts, and by adults’ poor understanding of the phenomenon. “No one was inside the bathrooms,” he says.
Mazhar and three friends, none of them serious e-cig users, channeled that frustration into the Instagram advocacy page, which posts news articles and personal testimonies about vaping.
His posts on Instagram and Twitter inspired thousands upon thousands of messages from vapers, most of them teenagers, vowing to quit. Deciding to capitalize on the attention, he founded the, a group aiming to educate teenagers about the dangers of vaping and nicotine addiction. Through the Foundation, he has spoken at schools and on Capitol Hill, produced an educational podcast and partnered with the mayor of Miami Beach on implementing an anti-vaping curriculum.
Simah Herman, a California 18-year-old, went viral only a few weeks after Ammirata. Almost a million people liked a series of photos she posted to her, showing her in a hospital bed, hooked up to a ventilator due to lung damage her doctors determined stemmed from vaping. In one, Herman stares solemnly into the camera while holding a handwritten sign reading, “I want to start a no vaping campaign.”
Public-health groups are now jumping on the trend, too. The anti-youth-smoking Truth Initiative this month paid six TikTok influencers—