It’s impossible to stroll through DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus and not catch the scent of a fruit-flavored GeekBar, Posh or other vaping device. But what’s up with the lingering scent of good old-fashioned cigarettes?
“When I got to DePaul, I was culture shocked,” Gracie Everett Crone, a DePaul senior, said. “Cigarettes are so normalized. Any time you go by the SAC and outside of The Theatre School, there’s a lot more cigarette smoking than I ever would have anticipated seeing.”
According to the Food and Drug Administration’s 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey, members of Generation Z smoke cigarettes less than previous generations. But even as the vaping craze sweeps through high schools and college campuses, cigarette use prevails.
“At parties, I really only see cigarettes,” Brady Barrow, a DePaul junior, said. “I think smoking is more social than vaping. Some part of me wonders if that’s maybe like a 2020 Covid comeback in some way — a way we’ve come up with to interact with each other, (after) the pandemic.”
The FDA survey, which did not include college students, found that electronic cigarette use actually dropped among middle and high school students, from 7.7% in 2023 to 5.9% in 2023-24.
But another study found that those who vape are also at a significant risk of turning to combustible tobacco. In 2020, the Missouri State Medical Association reported that “adults who vape are 3.6 times more likely to use combustible cigarettes later in life.”
Arriyana Franklin, a DePaul junior, prefers to use vapes but agrees that cigarette smoking on campus is noticeable. She wonders if it’s a way to control nicotine intake.
“Vapes are easily accessible,” Franklin said. “If someone’s trying to quit vaping, the best alternative will be something that’s … controlled.”
She believes the convenience of vaping encourages heavier use.
“Because cigarettes run out,” she said, “a smoker might think, ‘I’m gonna run out (of) this pack, and I’m gonna know that I’m … overdoing it.’
“But with vapes,” she continued. “You hit them all day long. It’s way harder to hide that you’re smoking.”
Franklin believes that the romanticization of older media, including classic movies from the ’70s through the ’90s, is contributing to more people smoking traditional cigarettes.
“People in ‘Grease’ were cool with their cigarettes. I think that’s a small, tiny part of it — but I also think that some people just prefer the flavor of cigarettes,” she said.
Crone believes the trends align with a false conception of maturity. She herself has never been interested in trying nicotine.

“Vaping and Juuls were so popular in our early years — maybe (cigarette smoking) has something to do with feeling like people have matured out of that,” Crone said.
Barrow shares a similar sentiment. She indulges in nicotine scarcely, but worries for her peers at The Theatre School.
“My friends in my major sit out on the bench and smoke, and then new freshmen will come down and someone will offer them a cigarette,” Barrow said. “Then that cycle continues, year after year.”
One thing is clear: no matter the form, statistics show that Gen Z is far from eradicating nicotine usage.
Medical research proves that nicotine and tobacco have detrimental effects on our brains and bodies. The Cook County Department of Public Health states that smoking kills more Americans each year than alcohol, car accidents, murders, suicides, drugs, and fires combined.
“Our generation wants to research their competence to make their own decisions and their ability to be independent people,” Crone said. “They’re making an adult choice — even if the choice is pretty reckless.”
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