She could feel the tears pricking her eyes. Before they have a chance to escape, she shoves a juul in her mouth and takes a deep breath. Better.

For senior Mabel, vaping serves as a distraction from school and stress. Since her tumultuous year in 10th grade, she has become primarily dependent on substances such as nicotine, marijuana and alcohol to keep herself level-headed amid the academic stress.

Mabel was caught off guard when she was greeted by an unexpected amount of schoolwork her sophomore year. When she began facing issues with her family and friends later on in the school year, compounding her stress from school, she tried vaping for the first time to help her cope.

“I was like, ‘I just need something to distract me,’” Mabel said. “So it wasn't really like, ‘How can I feel better?’ because I know I'm going to feel better.”

Junior Mila also began vaping and drinking during her sophomore year after finding it extremely difficult to adjust to the workload and difficulty of her classes.

“Sophomore year hit me like a truck,” Mila said. “It was my first chance to take honors classes, so I took [Chemistry] Honors and [Algebra 2/Trigonometry] … Moving from geometry and [biology] to [those classes] was such an immense amount of stress.”

During her sophomore year, Mabel would occasionally vape when school started to overwhelm her. But as junior year rolled around, she found herself picking up a juul more often, eventually reaching the point where she would vape every day — even before her doctor’s appointment, which led to a series of complications.

Following the incident at the doctor’s, Mabel realized her vaping was getting out of hand and began controlling her nicotine use. However, it wasn’t until the summer of 2019, when she had a marijuana-induced panic attack after taking cannabis edibles, that she significantly reduced her vaping. Since then, she’s relied more on alcohol, which, unlike weed, not only gives her a sense of unrestricted freedom, but is also more manageable as she dislikes drinking alone.

“[Alcohol] makes you feel like this whole other person,” Mabel said. “You can do whatever you want, say whatever you want. You can just be like, ‘Oh, I was drunk.’ … It's just like, you don't have a filter. So it's way different [from] weed.”

On the other hand, Mila tends to step away from partying and using substances when she’s particularly stressed about her academics. For Mila, doing well in school and paving a bright future for herself is her number one priority, and she says MVHS is adequately preparing her for college. While she admits that substances are very effective in relieving stress and feel good in the moment, she doesn’t want her academics to be affected by her use of weed and alcohol.

“I think that there is a time and place for everything,” Mila said. “I think that a moderate amount of drugs is okay, because you shouldn't deprive yourself of the things that are good in life. But a lot of people do it really often and do it at school, [and] I don't think that's a place and time you should do it because school is a place where we should learn and focus on improving ourselves.”

Similarly, Mabel believes that there should be equal importance placed on studying and de-stressing, and she is still working on finding that balance in her life. In fact, she thinks that students who are able to maintain high grades while still using substances demonstrate stronger time management skills and higher work efficiency.

“I know people who literally do [cocaine] and have 3.9 GPAs,” Mabel said. “That's so impressive, especially since [people] think if [someone does] hard-a** drugs … [they’re] a crackhead, or [they’re] going to be a loser for life or be homeless. But that's not how it works. Some people who are really smart just get into the wrong things.”

Mabel feels that she got into “the wrong thing at the wrong time, and for the wrong reasons.” She regrets having started juuling, acknowledging that she has already done damage to her body and sent herself down the road of addiction.

“If I could, I would go back to the first time I smoked … and say no, because I think I lost track of a lot of things,” Mabel said. “Especially now, I still don't have a solid coping mechanism besides smoking or drinking. I still need to find that way that makes me feel happy. But if I hadn't started [smoking and drinking,] I feel like I would have been way closer to finding that rather than still, you know, doing this.”

According to PhD in school psychology and research scientist at New York University Noelle Leonard, it isn’t uncommon for students to resort to drugs, alcohol and other substances to deal with stress, especially as they begin thinking about college. However, she states that there may be undesirable consequences for high schoolers like Mabel in the future.

“In the research literature, people who use alcohol or marijuana or other drugs for stress as opposed to socially are more likely to have problems later,” Leonard said in a phone interview. “The problems later on in life, in college, tend to be substance abuse problems.”

Even so, Leonard emphasizes that substance use often indicates underlying struggles, and the issue can’t be resolved by simply cutting off the substances entirely.

“I don't think you can just stop,” Leonard said. “I think the main thing is just finding out what's going on with them. Are they really stressed? What are they really stressed about? Does this help them, or are there other things [that can help], like exercise or other activities that are not substance related?”

Mabel has not had much success thus far in replacing nicotine, marijuana and alcohol with healthier alternatives, but she hopes that her peers can respect that her coping mechanisms differ from theirs, and that they do not reflect her character as a whole.

“Every single school has stress,” Mabel said. “And I don't know if it's because [of] the people, but [students at other schools are] way less judgmental. They're way more open about how you deal with things and not everything is related to school. Everyone has different ways of coping, and it just happens to be that [vaping and drinking] work the best for [me], even though that shouldn't be how you cope with things.”

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