Sugar-Starved Teens Chase Strange New High: Smoking Twix

Sometimes you hear things that make you wonder whether there's anything teenagers won't smoke. At least the latest trendy thing to spark up isn't scientifically acknowledged as addictive, doesn't seem to provide a genuine high, and tastes totally sweet: Twix. No, that's not a slang word for some substance you're too old to have heard of; some teens really are lighting up the candy bar. “Basically you're just smoking burnt food,” a 19-year-old rap-loving college freshman in North Carolina helpfully explains to The Fix. “But when you eat the burnt part it tastes like s'mores.” The practice isn't entirely new—but the social media explosion has apparently given it a resurrection in some quarters. An 18-year-old high school senior and aficionado confirms, “My sister said she saw someone do it on Tumblr.”

Just in case you're curious—and with the usual disclaimers about not trying this at home—the technique involved is to snip off both ends of a Twix bar, placing one end in your mouth while holding a lighter flame to the other end (because candy doesn't stay lit). Inhale, "filtering" the burning end of the candy bar through the length of its chocolate-covered, porous biscuit finger. Let the burnt chocolate flavor sink in. But why try, if you can't even get a sugar high? “People just do it for fun because it's kinda interesting to see smoke come out from a candy bar,” says our high school source. And it tastes like s'mores.