Kristen Lewis keeps a brown cardboard box in her office at Boulder High School. It’s filled with vape pens like JUULs, the leading brand of e-cigarettes, dozens of the pods that carry nicotine liquid, and a lonely box of Marlboros.
“This is what I call the box of death,” she said. “This is everything that we’ve confiscated.”
Lewis, the assistant principal, said school policy prohibits students smoking cigarettes and vaping electronic cigarettes on school grounds. But still, she and other school employees regularly find them in students’ hands and scattered all around.
Colorado topped the list for teen vaping in 2018, and Boulder is one of the hot spots. The teen vaping epidemic has created all sorts of health problems. It’s also created a whole new environmental problem in discarded pens and the abundant pods that come with them.
Read the rest of this story at Colorado Public Radio.
