Tobacco Use Prevention Education or TUPE, started in 1988, is a statewide program that educates middle and high school students about the harmful effects of smoking and vaping in an effort to prevent/stop kids from smoking or vaping, due to the prevalence of teenagers smoking. Now, TUPE has many clubs statewide, including one at Granada. The TUPE club at Granada is a club that is part of the effort to educate students about smoking, and now, vaping. Every year members of the club go to a training to learns about cigarettes and drugs so they can teach Granada students about smoking, vaping, and drugs. 

While TUPE has helped in decreasing the amount of students smoking, now more students are vaping than smoking, so that has become the main focus of the club.

TUPE Secretary Sophie Yuan (11)  points out that, “these days, a lot of students are relying on drugs and that kind of stuff, or for like recreational use, but they also need to learn about how it affects their bodies.”

According to the U.S Food and Drug Administration, e-cigarettes were the most popular tobacco product amongst students for the 10th year in a row.

“Vaping and smoking is becoming a lot bigger these days and becoming more and more common and normalized, “ says Sara Willey (11), co-president of the TUPE club.

She joined TUPE in middle school just to join a club, “but then I got really interested in the subject and I became passionate about how smoking and vaping harms people.”

She became co-president, along with Elizabeth Kagel (11), after the old advisor left and Mr.K became the advisor for the club.

“The previous officers all graduated so when the old advisor retired and Mr.K took it on, he wanted us to be the officers, cause we knew what the club was, cause he was still learning himself,” said Elizabeth. “It’s just a fun experience to learn something new and to try and educate others on the effects of smoking, like learning the numbers myself is pretty cool, learning the facts.”

The goal of the TUPE is to combat the amount of drug use on campus, mainly vaping, and they do that through activities and presentations.

“We go to a training, county training. And then we have lunchtime activities, we play games in the quad and teach people, we sometimes do presentations for the health classes, or other clubs,” Wiley said.

For training, kids in TUPE take a day off school for training. Mostly they learn about statistics and how companies advertise tobacco products.

“We make presentations for clubs and health class, and we do lunchtime activities, with like a jeopardy board, or a spinning wheel, with like trivia questions and that kind of stuff,” said Kagel.

Overall, the TUPE club is fun, and they’re doing important work of trying to raise awareness about important issues.

The club is pretty small but for Wiley she likes, “how we have a tight-knit group of kids who, even though there’s only a few of us, we’re all pretty close. Everyone is always really respected in whatever their experiences are.”

“It’s really fun, I mean our meetings are just really fun to hangout with each other, cause we’ll talk about stuff, and we hangout, and we make it really fun and enjoyable, and it’s kind of like a party everyday in there. From planning, and hanging out, sometimes we’ll even have parties ourselves,” said Kagel.

If you want to join the club, or you want to quit smoking or vaping TUPE club is on Thursdays at lunch, in S-1.

TUPE instagram: @ghstupeclub