Young Quebec basketball player Bennedict Mathurin is joining a campaign to inform high school athletes in Quebec about the harmful effects of vaping.

The campaign entitled “Vapoter, c’est pas ta game” is an initiative of the Quebec Student Sports Network (RSEQ) and the Quebec Council on Tobacco and Health (CQTS).

Bennedict Mathurin, a player for the Indiana Pacers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), is a former RSEQ student-athlete at Collège Charles-Lemoyne, now 20 years old. In a press release, he laments that vaping is increasingly affecting young people and that nicotine addiction is a trap in which one can easily fall.

He adds that to stop vaping, the best thing is to focus on yourself and on the pleasure of doing your sport.

Bennedict Mathurin will meet students from a secondary school next June to discuss this subject with them.

For his part, Stéphane Boudreau, deputy director general of the RSEQ, says he is worried about the banality of the vapoteuse, a scourge and a new social norm, he specifies that we must succeed in deconstructing. In his opinion, Bennedict Mathurin will make it possible to challenge the clientele of young people who are already in enormous demand.

The executive director of the Quebec Council on Tobacco and Health, Annie Papageorgiou, says that many young athletes look to vaping as a solution to manage their anxiety, but they quickly find themselves caught up in a powerful addiction to nicotine.

A survey by the National Institute of Public Health (INSPQ), the results of which were published in 2021, shows that in recent years, the use of electronic cigarettes has increased fivefold among high school students. The proportion of this clientele rose from 4% in 2013 to 21% in 2019 and rose to 35% for Secondary V students.