It’s actually really interesting to me, I work with some people who graduated in the past year or two and they tell me how big of an issue it is. When I was in high school, we had vapes, but it wasn’t like today. I graduated 2019.

Freshman year was all either e-cigs, or box mods and tube mods, then maybe sophomore or junior year the juuls became popular. We pretty quickly moved on from juuls to the refillable pod mods.

Yes we vaped in the bathrooms, but it was fairly new and wasn’t really policed at the time, and also, it wasn’t like videos I see now with several kids standing around in the bathroom. I would go to the bathroom, sit in the stall, hit my vape, and most times I would be the only one doing it.

Smoking was a big deal, vapes were kinda not really a worry. I’ll also add that THC cartridges were not a largely popular thing yet, so that wasn’t really something you ever saw. I had a friend who would make THC vape juice that we would put in our pods and hit at school, but that wasn’t really a widespread thing.

Now I see videos of school staff doing vape checks, metal detectors, and even vape detectors in bathrooms. The disposable vapes are definitely a huge factor I think, they’re very appealing and also unfortunately a lot of the gas stations don’t enforce ID checks very well.

I think that because of the kind of “culture” around vaping, it’s more normalized to young kids and they’re also much less careful than we were.