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Westerford High School in Cape Town is scrambling to contain an escalating vaping crisis among its students.
The biggest tell was how the school’s plumbing recently took a hit. In a bizarre but telling twist, blocked drains have been traced back to dozens of discarded e-cigarettes, as students – desperate to ditch the evidence – are tossing their vapes straight into the drainage system.
Westerford principal Mark Smith confirmed in an interview with Cape Talk presenter Lester Kiewit that the school recently recovered as many as 50 vapes from a drain.
And it’s not just a few rogue students. Vaping is surging among South African teens.
The University of Cape Town orchestrated a large study across 52 schools and eight provinces, interviewing over 25,000 high school students, and found that a staggering 16.8% of them are regularly using e-cigarettes.
Even more alarming? Nearly half of them said they reach for a vape within an hour of waking up – a major red flag for nicotine dependence.
“We’re obviously trying to do our best to stem the tide. We have said it’s something we’ll police and patrol, but the figures just seem too high. We can’t stop everybody and check,” Smith said in the interview.
“We have a wand that we use to pick up vapes and we are allowed to legally search if we have reasonable suspicion, but knowing what is in that vape is another story.”
And that’s where things get even murkier. Some students aren’t just vaping nicotine—there are reports of THC-infused vapes making their way into schools.
“I hear that there are vapes that have dagga in them,” Smith admitted.
These devices are often odourless, making it scarily easy for students to vape right in the middle of a lesson without anyone noticing.
The school has a strict no-vaping policy, but enforcement is proving tricky. With the vaping industry constantly evolving, teachers and parents are left playing a never-ending game of cat and mouse – while students unknowingly put their health on the line.
Nicotine addiction, lung damage, and even exposure to harmful chemicals are just some of the risks. And yet, for many teens, the appeal of vaping as a stress reliever or social buffer far outweighs the warnings.
So what now? Schools are cracking down, but as long as vaping remains trendy, accessible, and discreet, the problem isn’t going away anytime soon.
[Source: Primedia]
