Hayli Manning is about to graduate from Holbrook High School, but she still remembers the day she learned cigarettes kill.

"I was in first grade health class. I remember crying my eyes out because my mom smoked cigarettes,” she recalled.

As part of a statewide youth group called The 84 Movement, Manning now urges her peers to stay away from nicotine. Smoking cigarettes isn't the issue — her generation vapes.

“In hallways, classrooms, bathrooms,” she said. “I see it everywhere.”

At Holbrook's Sumner Field, about a dozen kids sitting on a set of bleachers agreed that vaping is ubiquitous. Several produced vape devices. They identified themselves as seventh and eight grade students. One girl said she got her vape device, also known as an e-cigarette, from an older kid. Several indicated they vape because it relieves stress.

Teens are using vaping devices in record numbers, according to a National Institutes of Health survey that found 25% of high school seniors vaped in 2018, up from nearly 20% in 2017. One out of every 10 eighth grade students said they vaped in the past year.

“We now have a vaping rate, both middle school and high school students, that is higher now than the smoking rate was when I started this work 25 years ago,” said Cheryl Sbarra, senior staff attorney for the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards.

Read more: Teen Vaping Soared In 2018

There are many vape products on the market, but one company dominates: Juul. Last year, tobacco giant Altria bought a third of the company. Its signature vape device looks like a computer flash drive.

“We’ll beat this Juul,” said Sbarra. “We’ll beat this Juul epidemic.”

Massachusetts was at the vanguard of the effort to change attitudes — and laws — about smoking. Now, with the rise of teen vaping, an old fight against big tobacco is back on. Sbarra said public health advocates will rely on the strategy that worked first time around: make clear the dangers and make it hard to get.

First, the dangers — including nicotine addiction.

Juul packages come with a nicotine warning, but what’s less clear is how much users are consuming. A pod, not much bigger than a pencil eraser, fits into one end of the Juul device. Each pod contains as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes.

“Kids are going through a pod a day. I’ve heard of kids going through two pods a day,” said Sbarra. “They get this really rapid hit and they love it … and they just keep using it more and more and more.”

Vape products contain far fewer of the dangerous chemicals in cigarettes, but many do contain chemicals linked to cancer. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has launched a campaign to get that message out on social media. But they’re competing in the same sphere where young influencers have already built followings extolling the virtues of vaping, and where teens are likely to find pictures of their friends posting vape selfies.

Read more: AG Healey Bans E-Cigarette Seller For Marketing To Minors

Which is why the second part of the strategy is key: Make the product hard to get.

As with cigarettes, vape devices are available and often prominently displayed in convenience stores, the same place kids go to get a soda or an after-school snack. In December, Somerville became the first Massachusetts community to restrict vape sales to tobacco stores only. Sbarra is working with local health boards across Massachusetts to encourage more communities to do the same, much as she did two decades ago as one community after another banned smoking in restaurants and bars.

“When legislators saw in their districts almost everyone had passed a policy,” she said, “that’s when we got smoke-free workplace [laws] passed.”

When people stopped smoking in restaurants, bars and other public spaces, she said, it changed social norms.

That’s what Dan Richards is trying to do at Georgetown Middle High School where, last fall, he became the first principal in the state to have vape detectors installed in school bathrooms. Students, he said, were complaining about the amount of vaping going on in the bathrooms.

“I can send a message: [Vaping is] not acceptable in the school setting and we will take extreme measures to help eliminate it,” said Richards.

When kids are caught, they get a reduced suspension if they do a three-week vaping diversion program.

Since the devices were installed, he’s fielded dozens of calls from colleagues around the country considering doing the same. He tells them changing the culture around vaping is even more important than the technology.

“The devices aren’t a magic bullet,” said Richards, “they’re part of educating kids.”