Junior Jacob Schneider, one of the dozen or so Old Saybrook High School (OSHS) students who are members of E3 (which stands for Encourage, Empower, Engage), has been involved since freshman year, and his participation in the group has had a profound effect on how he views substance use.

E3 is one of several youth prevention programs of the Governor’s Prevention Partnership, a non-profit organization based in Wethersfield. E3 is funded by the Connecticut Department of Transportation.

“E3 is a group of highly motivated high school students who focus on substance prevention,” said Wendy Mill, the Youth & Family Services (YFS) program coordinator who works with the OSHS group, which meets once a week at YFS.

Participants seek to raise awareness among their peers about substance use by conducting research and making presentations in health classes and at school assemblies. For the past three years, Mill said, the group has researched the health effects of vaping. The students presented their findings at a high school assembly in early December and will do so again in January at the middle school. In January, they’ll make a presentation to at the Old Saybrook Rotary breakfast.

Giving the Full Picture

Their presentation discusses how “vaping is an epidemic in our country,” Mill explained, as well as “how it’s affecting teens here in our community.”

E-cigarettes heat nicotine that’s extracted from tobacco, together with flavoring and other chemicals, to create a vapor that the user inhales, according to information on the John Hopkins Medicine website. And nicotine, no matter how it’s ingested, is highly addictive.

According to Schneider, around 40 percent of students in his sophomore class last year were vaping.

“It’s an ongoing issue in our school,” he said. “People vaping in the bathrooms. It’s all across the shoreline, really, and other towns have done surveys and programs like we’ve done.

“We realized [that] no matter how much you tell them it’s bad, it’s probably not going to change their minds,” he continued. “We give them the full picture, then let them decide. We also try and guide them.”

Schneider said he thinks the December high school presentation “was pretty well received,” spurring a conversation among students about the health impacts of vaping, which he feels many didn’t fully understand.

“[P]eople have been talking, realizing there’s negative health things that come with it,” he said. “I feel like most of the kids have grown out of [vaping], but there’s a core of kids still consistently using vapes.”

The Old Saybrook Police Department partnered with the local E3 group by offering vaping buy-back opportunities on three mornings before school. In exchange for vaping materials, students received gift cards for local businesses.

As of Oct. 21, the legal age to purchase tobacco products in Connecticut was raised from 18 to 21, but even before that change, district policy prohibited vaping on campus.

Mill views the legislation as a positive change.

“There were students legally purchasing” vaping materials before the minimum age was raised, she said. “That made it easier for underage students to get them.”

Substances and Consequences

The E3 program helps students think about their values and use them to guide their decisions. But Schneider said there are students who find that their values aren’t incompatible with substance use.

“There are kids that think that,” he said. “That’s why we leave it open at the beginning.

“We don’t want it to seem like we’re being super preachy,” he explained. “You want to keep your best interests in mind when you’re making decisions and have healthy values. At the end [of a presentation], we kind of drive it home more so that kids don’t think it’s completely okay. We talk about substances and the consequences that can happen. You want to keep your own wellbeing in mind when you formulate your values.”

Flavored vapes are “obviously catered toward a younger audience,” he said. But “[w]hether flavored or not, it’s still going to have negative consequences.”

Companies engage in false advertising, claiming that there’s only a small percent nicotine in their products when in actuality, the concentration is much higher, Schneider said. The nicotine from one pod is equivalent to that in an entire pack of cigarettes.

At weekly meetings, members work on presentations, hammering out what they’re hoping to communicate and how best to do that. Three meetings, or around six hours, are usually required to put together a presentation, according to Schneider. The high school vaping presentation has to be adapted for middle school students.

Schneider said that the discussions with fellow E3 members have got him “thinking so deeply about how I would present this to others” and have “changed my own view...Things can be overlooked when you’re thinking about substances. You think of it kind of as a small thing: It’s not a huge deal; when I encounter it I’ll deal with it then.

“But it’s more of a life decision and something you’ve kind of got to prepare for,” he continued. “People in my life are affected by substances.”

Recently, he said, “one of my best friends has kind of gone down a bad path. It helped me see other people’s point of view, why people make those decisions. But at the same time, I have to distance myself and make sure I don’t get involved.”

Being a part of E3 provided him with the opportunity to talk about it. And experiences like this are “something that we factor in and share” in the presentations, Schneider said.

“Al of our friends encounter things like that, too,” he explained. “We include things like that in our message. We show that this is in our community and it happens.”

Social Hosting Campaign

E3 is now embarking on a Social Hosting Campaign, an endeavor to convince parents to commit to providing a substance-free environment for their kids and their friends.

The group is selling blue garden flags for $5 as a sign of parents’ pledge to “provide a safe environment within their home, not knowingly provide substances to kids, keep substances in the home safe, and make sure an adult is present, aware, and paying attention,” said Mill.

The group will create a thank you for parents who purchase the flag to ensure they understand what they’re committing to, she explained.

Mill said her parents would call her friends’ parents went she went to a gathering at their house to ensure that there’d be adults present and that drinking would not be permitted.

“These days, there’s a lot of social isolation between parent groups,” she said. “We hope this will get the conversation started.”

Adults taking car keys away from intoxicated kids so they can’t drive home “is an admission of guilt,” Mills said. “People are trying to do the right thing, but [the best course is] not giving them access to alcohol in the first place,” she said.

That means keeping any alcohol in the home locked up as well as ensuring that prescription medicines are not accessible.

Proceeds from the sale of the flags will help four E3 students travel to the Washington, D.C. area in February for a conference of the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America.

“There’s a whole student track at the conference,” Mill said. “It’s an opportunity for them to network with other students.

Schneider predicts that the Social Hosting Campaign will be successful.

“It’s something small and it’s super cheap,” he said. “It’s definitely one of those things where if one mom does it, it will spread.”