B4 Metro The Boston Globe FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2019
Mayor Martin J. Walsh
called the students’ allegations
“incredibly disturbing.”
“No one should experience
racism or discrimination, not in
a place of learning and not any-
where,” Walsh said in a state-
ment.
“We have to be better. I com-
mend Boston police for taking
action as soon as they were
made aware of the allegations,
and I am confident they will in-
vestigate this case to its full ex-
tent.”
Martinez said she has been
telling her son, who is 15, to
obey police officers if they give
him orders.
“They’re still kids. For me as
a mom, I’m seeing both sides.
The kids were really loud, up in
his face trying to record him,”
Martinez said. “The police offi-
cer is still a human being.
Sometimes we just have a bad
day.”
Police identified the officer
as Joseph Lynch, a 16-year vet-
eran of the department who
was assigned to District E-18 in
Hyde Park. He will be on ad-
ministrative leave as the de-
partment’s internal affairs sec-
tion investigates, said Sergeant
uPOLICE
Continued from Page B
John Boyle, a department
spokesman.
Gross was careful to say that
he did not want to affect his de-
partment’s internal affairs in-
vestigation, but that he wanted
to apologize to the students
Thursday.
“My apology was that they
had a negative interaction, and
that could have caused them to
not trust the police,” he said. He
also wanted them to know that
he and Rollins “will listen to
their voices, and just as impor-
tantly, [want] to thank them for
using their voices.”
Rollins said she wanted to
make sure that the students
“know we’re listening, and if
what they allege happened, the
Boston Police Department is far
better than that.”
Roxbury Prep has three mid-
dle school and two high school
locations in Boston. The Hyde
Park building has students in
the ninth and 10th grades,
most of whom are black and La-
tino.
Barbara Martinez, a spokes-
woman for Roxbury Prep, said
the school appreciated Rollins
and Gross coming to listen to
the students.
“Numerous students and
staff have come forward to ex-press deep concerns about the
officer’s behavior, both in terms
of his actions and language,”
Martinez said. “The entire Rox-
bury Prep community — stu-
dents, families, administrators,
faculty, and staff — are shockedand deeply upset by what oc-
curred.
Negative interactions with
law enforcement can be espe-
cially harmful when they come
at a young age, said Oren Sell-
strom, litigation director forBoston-based Lawyers for Civil
Rights.
“It’s particularly damaging
when the conduct is directed at
children and young adults,”
Sellstrom said. “Do you look to
officers to protect you, or doyou see them as a hostile or rac-
ist element of your communi-
ty?”Gal Tziperman Lotan can be
reached at [email protected]
or at 617-929-2043.sory sent home.”
On Thursday, federal health
officials who are investigating
the outbreak said they are “in
desperate need of facts and an-
swers” as the number of new
cases keeps climbing.
The CDC said vaping-relat-
ed illnesses have now been
linked to at least seven deaths,
with 530 people sickened na-
tionwide. Massachusetts offi-
cials report at least 38 cases, in-
cluding seven teens hospital-
ized at Boston Children’s
Hospital.
A majority of those sickened
nationwide are under age 25 —
perhaps not surprising, given
the prevalence of youth vaping.
In interviews, harried Mas-
sachusetts school officials from
districts large and small said
the timing of the vaping crisis
caught them while they were
already slammed with the
opening of classes and the
heavy administrative workload
involved.
“It’s not something on the
top of everybody’s to-do list,”
said Glenn Koocher, executive
director of the Massachusetts
Association of School Commit-
tees. “They are trying to get the
transportation systems worked
out, and deal with everything
else schools, and principals,
and teachers have to do at the
start of the school year.”
And this year, school offi-
cials in many Massachusetts
cities and towns have also had
another public health scare to
contend with: Eastern equine
encephalitis, the deadly mos-
quito-borne virus that’s already
infected nine residents, includ-
ing a 5-year-old girl. For dozens
of communities with high
threat levels, EEE has seemed
more pressing and vexing, as
administrators have scrambled
to reschedule outdoor evening
events.
Most schools in the past few
years have taken steps to stop
kids from vaping, such as in-
corporating information in
health classes about substance
abuse, creating videos, and in-
stalling vaping detectors inuVAPING
Continued from Page Bbathrooms.
But administrators ac-
knowledge that being nimble
enough to address the emerg-
ing crisis has been challenging.
“A lot of this is rapidly
changing, and we are trying to
stay ahead of this,” said Thom-
as Scott, executive director of
the Massachusetts Association
of School Superintendents.
Even as schools have
ramped up anti-vaping efforts
in recent years, the number of
teens who have taken up vap-
ing has continued to explode.
New preliminary data released
last week from the 2019 Na-
tional Youth Tobacco Survey
showed nearly 28 percent of
teens reported using e-ciga-
rettes, up from 21 percent last
year.
Interviews with teens from
a half-dozen Massachusetts
school districts found a few
who said they had even tried e-
cigarettes or other vaping prod-
ucts. But just about all said
their knowledge of the latest
vaping-related illness was
gleaned not from their schools,
but from social media sites,
such as Snapchat, Instagram,
and TikTok.
“People post about it, and it
spreads like a virus,” said Rob-
ert, a 17-year-old senior at Es-
sex North Shore Agricultural &
Technical School, who first
heard about the epidemic on
Snapchat. Like most of theteens interviewed, he declined
to give his full name.
A 16-year-old junior from
Beverly High School, who was
sitting in the food court of the
Northshore Mall with her
mother, said she also couldn’t
remember receiving any notice
from her school.
The teen’s mother, a middle-
school teacher at a nearby dis-
trict, said the school where she
works didn’t send any commu-
nications out about the illness,
except to remind students at
the start of classes that vaping
is not allowed on school
grounds.
Sitting nearby was Lynne
Leonard, whose two daughters
attend Ipswich High School. All
three nodded vigorously when
asked whether the school had
communicated about the latest
illness.
“Since the beginning of
school, they printed out news
articles and posted them in the
cafeteria and in the hallways,”
said Maddison Tuttle, 17, an
Ipswich senior. “They talked
about it in the morning an-
nouncements.”
Some districts are just be-
ginning to alert parents now.
“I wanted to make sure we
introduced it to students and
staff first,” said Jim Hanna,
principal of Plymouth South
High School, who said he plans
to send an e-mail to parents
this week. He said he has alsoencouraged teachers to discuss
the latest news about vaping
deaths and illness in regular
small-groupmeetingsthey
have with students twice a
week.
But even among parents in
districts that have raced to alert
students and parents about
vaping-related illness, confu-
sion persists. Dr. Hasmeena
Kathuria, the mother of two
Needham High School stu-
dents, said she was relieved the
school brought up the topic for
students when classes first
started.
But Kathuria, an associate
professor of medicine at Boston
University School of Medicine
and a lung specialist at Boston
Medical Center, said some par-
ents seem ill-informed.
“When I hear people from
my town talk that it’s all THC
[marijuana]-related, and as
long as my child is not doing
THC, they should be fine —
that’s my concern,” she said.
Federal health officials who
are studying affected patients
say it has struck people who
vaped cannabis, nicotine, or
both, and who used both legal
and black-market products.
Vaporizers typically use
metal coils to heat oils or liq-
uids into vapor to be inhaled.
To her dismay, Kathuria also
has heard some anxious adult
patients who took up vaping to
help quit traditional cigarettes
say they think smoking might
be safer, and might take up that
habit again.
Now, Kathuria worries that
teens addicted to nicotine
through vaping might reach
the same conclusion — which
would be a terrible irony, given
the plummeting youth smok-
ing rates after years of educa-
tion by public health special-
ists.
“How are we going to man-
age this so all the efforts we had
to get our tobacco rates down
do not surge up again?” she
said.Kay Lazar can be reached at
[email protected] Follow
her on Twitter
@GlobeKayLazar.By Dan Adams
and Felicia Gans
GLOBE STAFF
Revenue from sales of mari-
juana vaporizers at licensed
cannabis stores in Massachu-
setts has plunged 25 percent
amid widespread consumer
health concerns about the de-
vices, according to data pro-
vided to the Globe by the Can-
nabis Control Commission.
Weekly sales of oil-filled va-
porizer cartridges, the second-
most-popular category of mar-
ijuana product (after cannabis
flower), fell from a recent peak
of $919,776 for the seven-day
period ended Aug. 11 to
$689,924 last week.
The sharp fall reversed
months of explosive growth in
vaporizer sales — consumers
overall have purchased about
356,000 individual vaporizer
products from licensed mari-
juana stores since sales began
last November.
It also came during a peri-
od in which four new recre-
ational pot retailers and two
medical marijuana dispensa-
ries opened in the state, sug-
gesting the actual decline in
demand is even larger.
Experts said the change,
which mirrors data from other
states where cannabis is sold
legally, is almost certainly be-
cause of warnings from state
and federal authorities that va-
porizers are probably the
cause of a mysterious outbreak
of lung ailments that has
killed seven people and sick-
ened another 530 people in 38
states.
Health officials announced
the first vaping-related death
on Aug. 23.
In Massachusetts, the De-
partment of Public Health said
Thursday that it was investi-
gating 45 suspected cases of
vaping-related illness.
Horace Small, a marijuana
consumer, community advo-
cate, and member of the state’s
Cannabis Advisory Board, said
he quit vaping at the urging of
friends and family members
concerned about the news.
“I just completely stopped,”
Small said.
“I had this vaporizer that
got me through [a vacation],
but I had enough people who
love me say, ‘Put the vape
down’ — so I did. Folks are
scared half to death. All my
friends are encouraging each
other not to vape and just err
on the side of caution until
there’s more knowledge on
what the hell is going on.”
The exact cause of the ill-
nesses remains a mystery.
Food and Drug Administra-
tion officials announced
Thursday that they have
launched a criminal probe into
the supply chain of companies
that manufacture nicotine va-
porizers.
State and federal officials
have said they suspect Vitamin
E acetate, an additive found in
someillicitmarijuanavape
cartridges, could be one cul-
prit and urged consumers to
avoid such products.
Other patients who became
sick, however, were simultane-
ously (or only) using e-ciga-
rette devices.
And experts have raised
concerns about additives in
regulated marijuana cartridg-
es, such as propylene glycol.
So far, no cases have been
linked to the use of marijuana
products sold at licensed
stores in Massachusetts. None-
theless, the data from the com-
mission suggest that lingering
uncertainty about the cause of
the outbreak is discouraging
many consumers from using
vaporizers.
Brandon Pollock, chief ex-
ecutive of the marijuana com-
pany Theory Wellness, said
consumer spending on vape
cartridges at his company’s
recreational shop in Great Bar-
rington has dropped about 20
percent since news emerged of
the health crisis. Overall reve-
nue has remained steady,
though, suggesting consumers
are simply switching to other
methods of consuming canna-
bis.
Like many other licensed
marijuana companies in Mas-
sachusetts, Theory Wellness
has launched a marketing
campaign aimed at convincing
customers its vaporizers are
safe and contain only pure
marijuana concentrate and
cannabis-derived terpenes, ar-
omatic compounds that occur
naturally in the plant.
Pollock is predicting that
vaporizer sales will rebound
and continue growing. That’s
because the devices are more
convenient and less odorous
than marijuana flower, he
said, and because the health
scare will prompt consumers
to switch from illicit products
to those sold in regulated
stores.
“I’m not surprised there’s
an initial contraction,” he said.
“I actually expect an increase
in sales as people really exit
the black market. I think peo-
ple right now are just digest-
ing the news — in the long
run, this is good for the regu-
lated cannabis industry.”
While the vaping-relatedillnesses have only recently
made national headlines,
many local doctors say the is-
sue has probably been going
on for much longer.
Vaping-related symptoms
— such as fevers, chest pain,
and breathing troubles—
could easily have been mistak-
en by physicians for pneumo-
nia or another common infec-
tion.
Also, most doctors only re-
cently began asking patients
whether they use vaping devic-
es.
A significant number of ex-perienced marijuana consum-
ers and patients said they had
stopped using vaporizers be-
fore the news of the health cri-
sis, concerned about the pres-
ence of additives or the possi-
bility that the heating coils in
cheap, Chinese-made cartridg-
es could be leaking heavy met-
als into the oil they contain.
“I used vape cartridges as
my main source of medicine
for about five years, but I’ve
actually stopped using those
and threw my last one away
completely,” said Kate Phillips,
a former dispensary managerwho uses medical cannabis to
treat symptoms of Lyme dis-
ease.
“I started to feel health ef-
fects I didn’t like, and at the
end of the day, the dispensa-
ries just couldn’t back up their
claims that these additives and
the disposable cartridges are
safe. I didn’t feel like being a
guinea pig.”
The Cannabis Commission
last week voted to require li-
censed marijuana companies
to disclose more information
on packaging about the types
and quantities of additives invaporized cartridges.
It will soon send out a bul-
letin and do a survey about
vaping to the companies it reg-
ulates and is coordinating
with testing labs about wheth-
er they can detect possibly
harmful additives.Dan Adams can be reached at
[email protected].
Follow him on Twitter
@Dan_Adams86. Felicia Gans
can be reached at
[email protected].
Follow her on Twitter
@FeliciaGans.Marijuana vape sales fall sharply amid mystery illnesses
NIC ANTAYA FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins visited Roxbury Prep High School in Hyde Park on Thursday.Officer on leave
after alleged slurs
Schools’ responses differ on vaping questions
STEVEN SENNE/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE 2018
Vaping has now been linked to at least seven deaths.
‘Ijustcompletely
stopped...Ihad
enoughpeople
wholovemesay,
“Putthevape
down’’—soIdid.’
HORACE SMALL
A member of the state’s
Cannabis Advisory Board