Online Reporter
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
IT is a Saturday afternoon at Hartsfield Rugby Grounds in Bulawayo.
All eyes are on the main field where Christian Brothers College’s first team is locking horns with Old Miltonians.
Cheers erupt from the crowd periodically as the 30 young men clash, tossing each other around with what appears to be a reckless disregard for their well-being.
Shoulder collides with shoulder, bone smacks into bone as the testosterone-fuelled young men push their bodies to the limits. Occasionally, a player stays down, wincing in pain as the display of controlled aggression becomes overwhelming.
However, while the players’ bodies appear worse for wear with every tackle, a skinny young woman in the stands seems to be in even greater pain than the burly young men on the field.
For an hour, she has not had a single puff from her e-cigarette, which she complains has run out of flavour. She cradles it in her hand, occasionally glancing at it as if by some miracle it might replenish and provide her with a few much-needed puffs.
With every passing minute, her cravings worsen.
This continues until she makes a phone call and begs someone on the other end of the line to buy a vape from her
“dealer” somewhere in the affluent suburbs of Bulawayo. After parting with US$20, she is soon puffing away again.
Order has been restored, and she is happy once more.
However, the reality of her situation is not lost on her.
“I know I am addicted to this thing. I cannot even go for 10 minutes without a puff from it. I got into vaping through a friend who told me it would help me get rid of my addiction to cigarettes. I now regret that moment because this thing is 20 times worse than cigarettes,” she said.
While parents and authorities are battling drugs and other illicit substances that have taken hold in Zimbabwe, vapes have emerged as a silent pandemic among young people of school-going age.
Vapes are battery-operated devices that heat a liquid (e-liquid) into an aerosol (or vapour) that users inhale, simulating smoking.
Across the world, vapes have found favour with young people, who are taking advantage of the fact that these devices are not as widely shunned or closely monitored as traditional cigarettes.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) points to the enticing flavours and targeted marketing to young people as the key reasons behind this trend.
In the United States, e-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco product among middle and high school students aged 12 and older, with 5,9 percent of students reporting use.
Surveys from the United Kingdom indicate that 20,5 percent of children (aged 11–17) have tried vaping and that 7,6 percent of children currently vape.
Similar usage rates, ranging from 3,3 percent to 11,8 percent have been found in Southeast Asia. In South Africa, a study published in The Lancet’s eClinical Medicine last year found that an estimated 16,8 percent of the sampled learners in eight provinces currently use e-cigarettes.
While there is no similar research for Zimbabwe, newly elected Bulawayo Junior Mayor, Kian Hawa, an Advanced Level student at Christian Brothers College (CBC), said that the use of vapes was widespread among his peers.
“I would go as far as saying that vaping is the most pressing issue we have faced in a very long time,” he told Sunday Life in an interview.
“Everywhere I look around me, I see people I thought were innocent, people I thought were on the right track and I see them vaping. This issue is so significant that, from my observation of my peers within the private schools in Bulawayo, I believe 60 percent of them are vaping.”
Hidden hazards of particular concern, Hawa said, was the number of young sportspeople now dependent on vapes.
“We are a country that encourages sports and over the years, we have produced some top sportspeople. Playing sports is something we do at our schools, but even those who are athletic are vaping, and it is affecting their young careers.
“A lot of our top sportspeople in schools do not even see the problem with this because they still perform at a high level while vaping. It is only later, when they begin competing with other top-level sportspeople, that they see how catastrophic their actions were,” he said.
Hawa said unlike cigarettes, there seemed to be complacency among young people when it comes to evaluating the long-term effects of vapes.
“They may not realise that this is a problem now because vaping has a very slow effect in harming your health. Currently, they think they are feeling fine when they are vaping.
“However, in the past two or three years, I have seen people I know develop what they call popcorn lung. Their lungs end up looking like popcorn and many young people do not understand that this will happen to them if they go down that path,” he said.
Last year, a study by Dr Azmy Faisal and colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University revealed that vaping damages young people’s lungs as much as smoking.
“Both vapers and smokers showed signs that their blood vessels were not working as well as the non-smoking and non-vaping group, according to the blood tests and ultrasound scans.
“The smokers and the vapers were more out of breath, experienced intense leg fatigue and had higher levels of lactate in their blood, a sign of muscle fatigue, even before they reached their maximum level of exercise,” said Faisal.
In Bulawayo, vapes have become increasingly attractive to young people because of the wide range of options available from the mushrooming dealers around the city. In most cases, the sellers do not particularly care if they are selling their products to minors.
“Vapes differ because we have some that are disposable, and on these, you cannot add any flavour to them, but you buy according to how many puffs it gives you,” said one learner who spoke to Sunday Life anonymously.
“Some have two thousand puffs; others have five thousand puffs. So, the price differs according to how many puffs one will get.
“Then we have reusable vapes. You can buy different flavours for them. These range from US$20 to US$100. Prices differ according to the range of functions that they can offer.
“Some can even be locked by the owner if they so wish, and all these features affect the price. Things like that just make them cooler to a lot of young people and that is why we do it. It is nothing like smoking cigarettes at all.”
As he prepares to start a campaign to confront the issue during his reign, Bulawayo’s new Junior Mayor Hawa acknowledged that he did not know if it was truly possible to steer his peers away from addiction.
“This is a problem that is hard to confront. Young people do not have a lot of information about vapes and it is something that is addictive by nature.
“Even if we tell them that this is going to harm their health, they react to this information in the same way that people addicted to other substances do.
“We need to think about how we are going to confront this. Currently, I do not have the answer to this and I do not think anyone else does,” he said.
