It’s an old cliché. The teams sneak off to the bathroom to smoke cigarettes, like the acrid smoke billowing out from the boys’ bathroom will go unnoticed by a passing teacher or security guard. Evidently, the old tradition never died; it evolved. Students are now doing it with Vapes instead of cigarettes, which, according to recent reporting, may give you all sorts of cancers.

Anyway, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because students are still flushing evidence of their clandestine nicotine use, but instead of foamy cigarette butts, they’re flushing big chunky plastic vapes. Kids are not getting smarter, are they?

CBS Baltimore reported this week that at Bel Air High School in Maryland, students flushing vaping devices to avoid getting caught have destroyed multiple toilets in just a month, briefly leaving every bathroom partially unusable. (a sentence I struggled to type because I was giggling so hard throughout)

In response, the school has brought in metal detector wands and threatened to make students pay for any damage they cause. The school says each toilet costs them $200 to replace.

This is not a one-off phenomenon specific to one school in Maryland. According to a report in Wired from November 2025, teen vaping has become embedded in modern school culture, with bathrooms acting as unofficial smoking sections. The old trope I used to think only happened in movies is real, alive, well, and thriving.

It’s become such a problem that schools have started pouring money into sensors and surveillance systems that monitor air quality and sound patterns in bathrooms in a wildly expensive effort to catch bathroom vapors in the act. They want to dish out suspensions to offenders, but only a tiny fraction of students are directed toward counseling or addiction support.