CDC: E-cigarette use by teens up tenfold in 4 years

If an average high school class contains 30 students, at least seven of them were tobacco users in 2015, according to a report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Visit a middle school classroom of the same size, and about three of them regularly smoked, vaped or dipped.

That shakes out to around 4.7 million children and teenagers who use tobacco.

Even more problematic, the report states, 'Tobacco use and addiction mostly begin during youth and young adulthood.”

'If current smoking rates continue, 5.6 million Americans aged 18 who are alive today are projected to die prematurely from smoking-related disease,” the report states.

In 2015, with all the overwhelming scientific evidence of the inherent health risks, those numbers might seem strange - until one considers e-cigarettes.

Use of conventional cigarettes is down, but a drastic increase in e-cigarette use among middle school and high school students from 2011 to 2015 - from 1.5 percent to 16 percent for high school students and from 0.6 percent to 5.3 percent for middle school students - has evened out the numbers.

Kids are using a different method, but the number of tobacco users in general has not fallen.

Three million high school and middle school students used e-cigarettes last year, according to information released by Thursday by the CDC.

The rise isn't new.

'Current e-cigarette use among middle and high school students tripled from 2013 to 2014,” the CDC wrote in a news release last April, when the number of users jumped drastically from 660,000 to 2 million for high school students and from 120,000 to 450,000 middle school students.

E-cigarettes, which are designed to vaporize nicotine and imbue the smoke with various flavors, such as fruit, chocolate and bubble gum, generate an estimated $3.5 billion in annual sales in the United States.

Proponents of e-cigarettes claim they're safer, since they don't burn tobacco and thus don't produce tar, but claims of safety are largely unsubstantiated.

Studies have found that some liquids used in e-cigarettes contain flavorings whose inhalation has been associated with lung problems.