To try to understand the youths, researchers snooped through their trash

Enlarge / Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau is disguised as a mountain climber, while hiding in a trash can, in a scene from the film 'The Pink Panther Strikes Again', 1976. (Photo by United Artists/Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Michael Ochs Archives)

While the government may be considered Big Brother, a team of researchers in California are officially that parent.

The researchers resorted to snooping through high schoolers' trash to get a better understanding of their vaping and smoking habits. The results of the "garbology" study appear in the October 11 issue of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The gumshoes-Jeremiah Mock and Yogi Hendlin of University of California, San Francisco-scanned the parking lots and perimeters of 12 public high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area between July 2018 and April 2019. They picked up any trash related to e-cigarettes, combustible tobacco products, and cannabis products that they suspected litter-bug teens left behind.

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