By Marina Green

Tara Roberts knows that her penchant for organic food, strenuous workouts and most recently, vaping, makes her a walking contradiction.

The 46-year-old retail manager from Manteo, N.C., smoked cigarettes for 22 years before quitting for the next 10. It wasn’t until January 2024 that she started vaping, after her adult children suggested she try it.

“I love it,” she said in a recent interview with Surfers & Chess Players. “As soon as I hit that vape, I get a little of that stimulant. My brain just fires better.”

It all began when her children asked if they could vape in her house one Saturday night. She insisted they go outside, but then followed them out. That’s when they offered her one.

“I said, ‘Give it to me,’’’ she recounted. “It was blueberry. I said, ‘This is delicious.”’

A week later, she bought her own device, a vape called “Lost Mary Mad Blue,” described as a flavor mixture of blueberries, raspberries and black currants. It remains her favorite flavor. She also enjoys cherry lemonade and pineapple.

Remember, Tara is a woman who walks briskly at least an hour a day most days, does 30 minutes of dumbbells and squats three times a week, and bicycles for dozens of miles as often as she can. Meals consist of proteins and vegetables, and mornings typically begin with a protein and fruit smoothie.

“I’m very focused on my health, which is crazy because I’m vaping,” she said.

Vaping is a habit for 1 in 20 Americans. Consider that e-cigarette usage increased from 8.8 percent to 10.2 percent among U.S. adults ages 18-29, between 2019 and 2021, according to the most recent American Cancer Society data. And the trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

Respiratory experts say it’s simply too early to know how vaping may increase lung disease in coming decades.

The obvious question is: does Tara worry about the risks?

“I’ve heard about it being bad for me, but I really didn’t want to read about it,” she said. “Do I think about it? Yeah, it’s on my mind. Yeah, it could be bad. But at this point in life, I just want to enjoy it.”

Still, she does set parameters.

She won’t touch it until all her exercises are done. That means she won’t fire it up until it’s past noon.

“If it starts to slow me down, I’ll put it down,” she said. “I think I could put it down anytime I want.”

She doesn’t count the minutes until noon so she can vape, but it is something she does immediately upon getting in her car to head out.

“I vape on my way to work,” she said. “On my days off, I’m careful. I don’t want to be hitting that thing all day long. On Fridays and Saturdays, I don’t limit myself at all. I may be doing 50 or more hits a day.”

A typical weekday is more like 10-30 hits, she estimated.

Several weeks before our interview, she did something she’d told herself she wouldn’t do. She smoked a few cigarettes during her weekend nights out at a bar. By the third week, it started catching up with her.

“It was a little harder to do my weights and walks,” she said. “I said I’m not doing that again. I can’t afford to not be 100 percent.”

She has felt no such impact from vaping.

In fact, part of her skepticism about scary terms like “popcorn lung” is that she and her three children don’t know anyone who has suffered ill effects from vaping, or at least not anything that couldn’t be solved by taking a break from it for a few days, she said.

Popcorn lung is bronchiolitis obliterans, a rare, chronic lung disease that damages the tiniest airways causing cough and shortness of breath. Some clinicians believe there is a link to vaping.

“You hear all this stuff on social media and on the news, but nothing is happening to anyone we know,” she said. “It makes me wonder how prevalent this popcorn lung and other side effects are.”

But Tara isn’t thinking about that. For now, vaping — with its cost of about $25 for 5,000 hits — offers comfort.

“It fills a void,” the newly separated redhead admitted. “It has become a friend, just like cigarettes were.”

She enjoys the camaraderie that happens in bars and at parties when she can swap her vape for new flavors she hasn’t tried. “I started noticing that everyone is grabbing them and puffing,” she said. “They just start passing them around. From an older, more mature point of view, it’s ridiculous.”

As someone who’s experienced both, the vaping nicotine high is about the same as with cigarettes, she said.

“I enjoy vaping so much,” Tara said emphatically. “If I find out it’s going to put me in the hospital, I’d have to rethink it.”