Teacher hates vaping. Students love him. Enter the perfect birthday gift: a steamroller.

As a high school teacher, Gary Pierce detests vaping like candy-coated poison, and he keeps a hawk’s eye out for classroom violators puffing on devices disguised as Chapstick tubes, blowing covert clouds down their sleeves.

When he catches them, he confiscates their battery-operated contraband and keeps it till the end of class, when he smashes it.

With delight.

“My preferred method is a four-pound maul,” Pierce explained. “Usually, it takes three or four whacks.”

So at the end of this school year — for his birthday — his adoring students at Triton High School gave their vape-hating teacher a present. They rounded up a stash of 76 devices from the desk drawers of teachers, administrators — even the principal.

Then they lined them up in the parking lot and crushed them with a steamroller.

Pierce, beside himself with happiness, even wore a hard hat and safety goggles.

“While it is funny,” he said, “we want to show that we brought out the biggest, baddest thing we can think of to show how big a problem this is.”

Vaping ‘that’s going to freaking kill them’

Pierce teaches horticulture and natural resources classes at Triton, about an hour south of Raleigh in Harnett County, and he’s one in a handful of FFA Advisors. This year, he started the school’s outdoors club.

“I think it’s important to get these kids outdoors, let them breathe fresh air,” he said. “I think it’s ironic that when they’re in class, they want to do the opposite: Suck stuff into their lungs that’s going to freaking kill them.”

The U.S. Surgeon General warns that e-cigarettes sold in kid-friendly flavors can harm a developing brain and damage lungs with heavy metals inhaled along with the vapor. NC Attorney General Josh Stein filed a lawsuit against the e-cigarette maker Juul’s co-founders in 2021, and he has already won a $40 million settlement over the company’s youth-oriented marketing.

But Pierce, who estimates he collected a dozen vaping devices in the last semester, knows every trick a vaper will try to avoid detection — aided by the companies themselves.

The vape pens Pierce seizes come camouflaged as lip balm, memory sticks, ear bud cases, magic markers or highlighter pens.

“When you see somebody put a highlighter in their mouth and blow a cloud out,” he said, “you got ‘em.”

The power of smashing things

A kid desperate enough to exhale a vape cloud into a book bag doesn’t grasp the concept of long-term consequences. At 16 or 17, they can’t appreciate Pierce explaining that while vaping doesn’t cause the immediate damage of a car wreck, it can keep them from meeting their grandkids.

But the spectacle of smashing things with a hammer will capture any teen’s attention. Not only will they watch and remember, they often join in the destruction, dropping the maul on the vape device rather than taking a full swing.

One of his classes appreciated the ritual so much they started bringing Pierce vapes to pulverize at the end of class, sometimes two a day. During teacher appreciation week, they would appear on his desk with a Post-It note attached, decorated with hearts.

That same class hit on the idea of lining up a string of confiscated vapes as though they were harvested from a hunt. “Kind of like duck hunters do,” Pierce said.

When the principal offered up his private stash, the floodgates burst. Suddenly everyone at Triton who had ever surprised a vaper hiding in a restroom stall contributed to the pile of seized goods.

Think bigger — a steamroller!

But a hammer seemed ill-suited to the job.

“We gotta think bigger,” Pierce told them.

And just like that, one student whose father owned a construction company offered up the steamroller sitting in their front yard. The father in question not only supplied a lowboy trailer to bring it to Triton, he sent a second employee to fix the machine when it wouldn’t start.

The line of brightly colored vape pens made a sick crackling sound as the wheel rolled over them, and when the driver threw the steamroller in reverse and backed over them for good measure, they let out a plume of smoke as they fizzled into squashed uselessness.

Pierce dropped to one knee and posed for a picture, smiling with a broom in his hand, his enemy turned to trash.

He isn’t naive. He knows this performance won’t stamp out the scourge of his classroom. Dedicated vapers might lament having to fork over another $40, or talk an older brother into buying a replacement, but they’ll shrug off the pain for a chance to vape again.

But Pierce might create just enough of a hassle to change a few minds and rescue a few teenage lungs.

Not long after the steamrolling, a nearby middle school called to offer up their supply of contraband, so Pierce is now doubly committed.

And with Fort Liberty just down the road, who knows? Maybe next year he’ll get a tank.