Boston City Councilor at-large Annissa Essaibi George addressed public health concerns at the Chinatown Coalition meeting Feb. 13 at Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. (Image courtesy of Yiming Zhao.)

The Chinatown Coalition met Feb. 13 at Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center to discuss smoking and vaping in Chinatown.

Sherry Dong of Tufts Medical Center explained heart disease and lung cancer are connected to tobacco use. Access to mental health counseling and behavioral help is essential to people trying to quit smoking and vaping.

Edgar Elmudesi from Health Resources in Action gave a comprehensive presentation on the teenage vaping epidemic. Elmudesi said tobacco companies target young people, especially people of color, with ad campaigns and deceiving products. He showed vaping products shaped like USB drives or correction tape that pass as school supplies for teenagers. What also drew teenagers to vaping are flavored tobacco. There are more than 8,000 flavors currently on the market. Many are sweet and teens won’t get the same nauseous feeling from smoking combustion cigarettes. Elmudesi passed around different flavored nicotine “drops” for attendees to smell. He warned despite vaping products smelling like candy, they all contain nicotine and other dangerous chemicals. The nicotine makes them highly addictive.

Boston City Councilor at-large Annissa Essaibi-George attended the meeting. She plans to bring more family-sized affordable housing projects to Boston in the new year and have at least one nurse in every Boston public school. She also expressed concern over a sudden increase of HIV cases and more needles around the city.

“The City last year collected 700,000 needles,” Essaibi-George said. “But two years before that, we only collected 300,000. That’s because the drugs have changed. As the opioid crisis gets bigger, we’re starting to see some shift in drug use patterns. Every drug on the street right now is laced with fentanyl. The behavior of someone dealing with methamphetamine addiction is very different from someone dealing with heroin. Those behaviors are creating more street and sexual violence. We need to make sure our first responders are trained to respond properly.”