Anti-Vaping Video Contest

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – As traditional smoking becomes a thing of the past, the habit continues in the form of vaping.

Maysville High School Students Carley Becker and Greyson Hearing talked about their efforts in spreading the word of how harmful the effects of vaping can be.

“I had started seeing the posters in the hallways here at school on the bulletin boards and stuff,” Becker said. “So like anti-vaping scholarship. Do you want to do this? And I was like oh, this seems a little interesting. And then our teacher brought it up to me, our visual design teacher. He’s like hey, I think that since you guys do this stuff with videos and storytelling and all of that, that you would be good to try this experience in more of a narrative.”

The students were awarded a $5,000 scholarship from the Zanesville-Muskingum County Health Department for their production. The video was chosen by members of the Muskingum County Community Youth Foundation and will be featured throughout the summer at the Colony Square Mall’s Cinemark Movie theaters as a pre-movie advertisement. 

“‘Before It’s Too Late’ is the title,” Hearing said. “And I think that really, it just conveys to a lot of people that you know, vaping is a path that you go down and once you go down it, it’s hard to come back out of it. And I think that’s just kind of what we portray in the video. Like there’s certain scenes like the… clinic scene that kind of like, is before the final scene, which again just shows them vaping and so it’s a hard path and it’s a recurring path.”

Both students agreed that peer pressure was a huge lead into vaping followed by the sensations and flavorings. They also recalled hearing accounts of vaping usage as early as middle and elementary schoolers. The video was posted online by the Zanesville Muskingum County Health Department.