The following is satire for the Opinions section

Big tobacco has had a death grip on America since time immemorial, and who can blame America? With such radical marketing techniques as Joe Camel and his seductive smirk, the Marlboro Man and his southern charm or even their uncanny ability to kill any scientist or dissenter who proved how deadly and addictive their products were. Even the Clintons are jealous of that ability to hide information!

Those darn facts kept cropping up though, and what was once given out freely to elementary schoolers was pushed back to high schoolers. Eventually, we came to this modern dystopia where cigarettes are illegal to purchase if you’re under the age of 21. 

Yet, there is hope if you’ve got stocks in big tobacco. Vapes exploded onto the scene in 2006, another ploy allowing these drug companies to get a new generation of children addicted to nicotine. And if the back of my high school bus was anything to go off of, it worked phenomenally. As of 2021, around 20% of 15-year-olds used e-cigarettes. 

But Generation Z is wiley, slippery and not so easily defeated. A recent poll, conducted independently by me, sampling three whole other people, determined there is a new tactic to defeat vaping once and for all…

Smoking cigarettes!

It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. As one of the interviewees, Nick A. Teen, confided with full confidence in the anonymity I promised, “It’s a cycle. I would smoke to stop vaping, then vape to stop smoking. I think I might have a nicotine problem.”

Using advanced techniques such as smoking cigarettes to satiate the nicotine addiction vaping has given is truly ingenious. Nicotine patches are for cowards; nicotine gum is hard to find; nobody actually knows what zyn is. But this way, we can finally take money that we were giving to big tobacco through vapes and give it to…big…tobacco?