Poison Into Passion: Colorado High School Students Make Art From Vapes

Mountain Range High School visual arts teacher Kyle Wimmer usually takes one specific day off every year: November 2, he says, "is a really personal thing." It’s his sobriety anniversary, and Wimmer celebrated eight years without alcohol this year. But on his sixth sobriety anniversary in 2021, he ended up going to work. It made a huge difference.

“I was really honest with the kids,” Wimmer says. “I told them why it was a day I usually wasn’t here for, and why.” On his seventh anniversary, inspired by his students’ reactions the year prior, he took the conversation to the next level. “I became a guest speaker for myself,” he says, “and challenged the kids to go 24 hours without vaping. Or just give me your vape pen.”

Wimmer isn’t just concerned about vaping in terms of its negative effects on teens — he sees it as a slippery slope to other, even more harmful addictions, not that nicotine isn’t bad enough. “I don’t think vaping will always necessarily lead to harder stuff, but it sure doesn’t help. And nicotine is powerful. My colleagues see these girls crowded into one stall in the restroom, sharing a vape pen,” Wimmer shakes his head. “There are sometimes girls knocking on the stall door needing to use the facilities for their real purpose, you know? It’s an addiction that affects everyone, really.”

Wimmer recalls interrupting a young man in the boys’ restroom two years ago, asking him what the vaping was all about, listening to him talk about why he started and why he felt the need to keep doing it. “At the end of that restroom conversation, he shook my hand,” Wimmer says, “and two years later, he’s still vape-free. I think about that a lot when I’m talking with the kids. It can just take that one interaction.”

In posting his anti-vaping work with his students to Instagram and other social media, Wimmer heard from a parent who suggested he connect with Parents Against Vaping E-cigarettes (PAVe). The group is a national grassroots organization founded in 2018 by three New York City moms after they discovered that a JUUL representative entered their sons’ high school that same year through an outside anti-addiction group, without the school’s knowledge, and told the ninth-grade students, without adults present, that JUUL was “totally safe” and would receive FDA approval “any day.” Both statements, according to the PAVe website, were and remain utterly untrue.

The relationship between Wimmer and PAVe has been a fruitful one; Wimmer has sat on several national panels in regard to vaping and teens. Most recently, he was a significant part of a New York Times article on illicit e-cigarettes. But closer to his heart is clearly the work that he does at Mountain Range, one on one with students.

That’s always been true for Wimmer in the past couple of decades of his teaching career. Even before his sobriety, he worked to be there for his students, earning the name “Coach Counselor” because of his dual roles as running coach and willing and able support system. Wimmer recalls back in 2009, he had a star athlete on his team that got into a terrible car accident while under the influence. “I’d always been that ‘Don’t let one night ruin the rest of your life’ guy for my students,” says Wimmer. “Even in my drinking days. A couple of years ago, we established an ‘Escape the Vape’ Day at school, where every passing period, we’d have announcements about the dangers of vaping.” Wimmer spoke to his students that day about his own struggles with addiction. “That day, I had four vape pens turned in,” he says.

That seventh sobriety anniversary last year was a turning point for one of Wimmer’s favorite students, Jace Snyder, whom he’s been mentoring ever since. She turned in her vape pen that day, and her influence among her peers was such that even more vapes kept flooding in. “I’d just been keeping them all in this box,” Wimmer said, “but at some point, I thought it would be great to be able to show the effect of my students giving these up. Visual impact, right?”

Wimmer considered the body-sculpting work an artist friend of his did, and mentioned to Snyder how cool it would be to craft something like a transparent mannequin to fill with the discarded vape pens. “She took that idea and ran with it," he says of his student. "It became this thing that people would talk about: 'Have you seen the vape sculpture?' And you could just see her light up, because that was her thing. It gave her a purpose. It turned that poison into a passion.” That art piece, titled "Vaped and Hollow," won a Gold Key and a Gold Medal from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

"Vaped and Hollow" became the genesis moment for a lot more art from students dealing with the subject of addiction and vaping. Another student, Matthew Trujillo, wanted to illustrate how hard it is to decide between addiction and education. "So he had a vape pen in one hand, and a school pen in the other, and with a slow shutter speed, he created an image of his head moving back and forth like he’s weighing those two options.” That piece won a Gold Key, as well.

The number of artworks Wimmer is collecting with his students is only growing, and he’s considering doing a show at some point. “Eventually there will probably be enough,” Wimmer says, “but I don’t want that to be what it’s about. I want the kids to be able to do it because they feel that fire burning within them. It’s not about being part of a show, as cool as that would be. It’s about them and their survival.”

Wimmer recently stepped down as track coach for Mountain Range in order to better and more thoroughly serve the kids in the Phoenix Club, where students facing substance-abuse issues can come for support. “Athletes will always have coaches,” says Wimmer with a smile. “These kids won’t always have someone. I feel like this is my calling.”