"It will end up being like any other social issue that parents have to deal with... it's all about having a connection to your kids and about keeping talking to them," said Mr Dillon, who is the director of Drug and Alcohol Research and Training Australia.

"Are you going to be able to inoculate your child to prevent them taking part in risky behaviours during adolescence? Absolutely not.

"But what you can do by maintaining a really healthy positive connection with your child is that they have some kind of resilience, so if something goes wrong, if they're exposed to this, they do start vaping, or they hang out with a group of kids that do, that they're able to bounce back.

"They manage to get through adolescence safer."

Related: Principals concerned at number of Hunter teens vaping

Mr Dillon will speak about vaping with Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle families in a Thursday webinar.

The diocese's Federation of Parents and Friends Associations executive officer Cath Garrett-Jones said the federation regularly booked speakers in response to issues in the media, such as this case, or surveys of members. She said about 200 people had registered.

E-cigarettes are battery-operated devices that deliver an aerosol or vapour by heating a solution. Using one is known as vaping.

There are many devices and solutions, including disposable devices that teens favour.

Most, Mr Dillon said, contained nicotine.

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He said there were hurdles to understanding the size of the issue, due to the lack of reliable and recent data about usage; the chemicals in solutions; and long-term health risks.

"With smoking the message is so simple, 'Smoking kills, don't smoke', with vaping we have not got to that point where we can say a very clear message that is simple to hang on to a media campaign - and that's the struggle parents have."

The most recent Australian Secondary Students' Alcohol and Drug (ASSAD) survey from 2017 showed 14 per cent of the 20,000 respondents had "ever vaped" and 32 per cent of these had vaped in the past month, but didn't indicate how many vaped regularly.

He said while "everyone" wasn't vaping, this was the first time since teachers monitored toilets for cigarette smoke that this many schools have had to respond to substance use on their grounds.

He said he'd even heard about schools installing vaping detectors, children who couldn't get through the day without vaping, year five students vaping and 14-year-olds wearing nicotine patches.

"I've done this for [30 years] and I've never ever had one issue that has dominated almost every conversation I have with schools," he said.

"Very few schools are not having issues with vaping.

"I'm getting a lot of parents saying 'My child is having a problem with vaping, they've been suspended a number of times or expelled, where can I go for help'?

"There's this anecdotal information that something is happening, but we don't have good strong data to back it up."

Mr Dillon said students bought disposable devices online and through social media, in person from others, or from shops that risked large fines.

Even during lockdown, students have them delivered. Vapour can be difficult to detect in the air.

He said families were "confused", hearing public health concerns that vaping normalised smoking and introduced young people to nicotine, as well as harm reduction advocates saying e-cigarettes were useful tools for those who wanted to quit smoking. He said some students believed vaping was safer than smoking.

"It's safer to get hit by a car than by a truck - just because it's safer does not mean it is safe," he said.

"We really don't know anything about the long-term impacts.

"Even the pro-vaping lobby will say in almost everything they write, 'Teens should not vape' [but won't say why not]."

He said the lobby pointed to UK and US data that showed that most people who vaped had smoked before.

"But every case I have... not one of them smoked a cigarette beforehand. A packet of cigarettes in the US is $8, they're $28 here," he said.

"I could come back in 20 years and say to you, 'We've been studying vaping for 38 years now and it's not that bad, go for it'. But - and here's the big but - I could come back in three years' time and say 'If you were vaping at 15 or 16 go and get a medical check up, because we've just discovered a terrible cancer or lung disease that we didn't even know about before'.

"This is an area that is so new, that if you're involved in it you're taking a risk."

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