Sop you beautiful bastards I hope you about a fantastic Friday

welcome back to the Philip DeFrenko show and today I want to do something a

little bit different I want to talk about just one big story today that's in the

news now but we're going to be seeing a lot more in the future too and

that's why today we're going to be talking about vaping.

What started as a subculture among young people and adults trying to quit smoking

traditional tobacco products has now grown into a multi-billion dollar global industry.

And in fact, according to the market research firm, P&S Intelligence, the e-cigarette and vaporizer market

is expected to reach a valuation of $44 billion by 2023.

And the growth of this market among young people, especially in the United States,

has been pretty dramatic over the last few years.

And what we've seen is that while the use of traditional tobacco products, things like cigarettes,

cigars, by high schoolers and middle schoolers, that has dropped and in fact dropped by nearly

1 million students between 2011 and 2017, the number of students using

e-cigarette products tripled between 2013 and 2014.

And last year, 2.1 million young people used e-cigarette products, or just to kind of give you

an idea, we're talking about nearly 12% of high schoolers and 3.3% of middle schoolers.

And the big thing here is that these numbers are continuing to rise.

According to preliminary data from the FDA that has not been officially published yet,

there's been a 77% increase in e-cigarette use among high schoolers this year

compared to last year. Now to be clear here the science shows that e-cigarettes and

vaporizers are safer than traditional tobacco products but the rapid growth

...