Bathroom Lines Lengthened by Vape Squad

A greeting of fruity-scented clouds of smoke crawling through the cracks of a stall door is now the norm when girl’s visit the restroom during the school day.

Clusters of students gather in the handicapped stall to get their nicotine fix while those who truly need to use the bathroom suffer in line for the few remaining toilets.

La Puma is nothing if not deeply familiar with the vaping epidemic that afflicts campus— we made our vaping coverage debut with an exposé last year, delving behind closed doors (or bathroom stalls, if you will) to inform the community of the steady march some students are choosing to undertake towards death, 1 puff at a time.

Yet the more practical consequence of this growing trend is the inconvenience it poses on those who really need to use the bathroom for what it was intended. The vaping schedule of a handful of foolish teens has increased bathroom wait times.

The strain on restroom resources is high enough without students hijacking stalls for vaping. The handicapped stall in the C-hall girl’s bathroom is particularly affected by this phenomenon, as it is considered prime real estate for herds of underclass (and classless) vape slaves.

While it may be that both the male and female campus populations have succumbed to the vaping addiction equally, the disciplinary consequence for such behavior is certainly not distributed with the same balance.  Administration does not monitor the girl’s restroom with the same gusto as the boys’.

The same clusters of girls return day after day to monopolize the handicapped bathroom stall while their peers turn a blind eye— no one likes a snitch.

But when you can see 5 pairs of shoes from beneath the stall door, it’s neither subtle nor courteous.

The situation has forced some students to change their bathroom patterns.

This dependance on the hourly “fix” is not just impacting the health of the individual vape drone, but also negatively impacting the broader student population.

Yet what students choose to do on their own time is frankly not my problem, and not what I’m worried about. Every student at school has likely made questionable decisions in their free time, and I’m not the moral police. But when your degree of apathy, ignorance, or whatever you want to call it, is so high that you continue to inconvenience other people enough to change their daily schedules, it crosses the line.

Ultimately, I don’t believe that it should have to come to the strict, strip searching, staff patrolling, peering-into-student-restrooms kind of enforcement.

But as the issue continues to escalate and interfere with the necessary functions of the human body for so many students, it’s time for these students to muster the nerve to move out of the shadows of the bathroom stall and into the halls, the quad, the parking lot and leave the rest of us to pee in peace.

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