The Promise of Vaping and the Rise of Juul

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From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul

The Promise of Vaping and the Rise of Juul

Teens have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, molded in their own image.

American Chronicles
May 14, 2018 Issue
By Jia Tolentino


“Smoking is gross,” a high schooler said. “Juuling is really what’s up.”
Photograph by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New Yorker

If I get addicted to vaping, I thought, in March, I will always remember this Texas strip mall. I was walking out of a store called Smoke-N-Chill Novelties, in Southwest Austin, holding a receipt for $62.95 and two crisp, white shrink-wrapped boxes. I got into the driver’s seat of a rental car and began to open them. From one I extracted a Juul: a slim black vaporizer about half the width and weight of a Bic lighter, with rounded edges and a gently burnished finish. (It looks like a flash drive, everyone always points out. You can recharge it by plugging it into your computer.) From the other I extracted a thumbnail-size cartridge called a pod, filled with juice containing a cigarette pack’s worth of nicotine. The juice in my pod was cucumber-flavored. This was an odd choice, I was later told; of Juul’s eight flavors, people tend to prefer mango, or mint. I inserted the pod into the Juul, and a little light on the device glowed green. I took a sharp experimental inhalation and nearly jumped. It felt as if a tiny ghost had rushed out of the vaporizer and slapped me on the back of my throat.

I took another hit, and another. Each one was a white spike of nothing: a pop, a flavored coolness, as if the idea of a cucumber had just vanished inside my mouth. As I pulled out of the parking lot, my scalp tingled. To Juul (the brand has become a verb) is to inhale nicotine free from the seductively disgusting accoutrements of a cigarette: the tar, the carbon monoxide, the garbage mouth, the smell. It’s an uncanny simulacrum of smoking. An analyst at Wells Fargo projects that this year the American vaporizer market will grow to five and a half billion dollars, an increase of more than twenty-five per cent from 2017. In the latest data, sixty per cent of that market belongs to Juul.

That’s just a fraction of what old-fashioned smoking brings in—the U.S. cigarette market is worth a hundred and twenty billion dollars. But it’s a fast rise after a long wait: inventors have been attempting to develop a successful electronic cigarette since the nineteen-sixties. Traditional cigarettes pair nicotine—which, contrary to common belief, does not cause cancer—with an arsenal of carcinogenic substances. As the harm-reduction pioneer Michael Russell said, in 1976, “People smoke for the nicotine, but they die from the tar.” And so people keep looking for healthier ways to deliver a fix. Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds have reportedly invested billions in creating so-called heat-not-burn products, which generate smoke from tobacco at lower temperatures than cigarettes do—but early versions of these, released in the eighties, flopped. More recent efforts are still awaiting F.D.A. review.

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[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Excellent article.....

Vaping weed is very very popular, esp. in places where you don't want to openly smoke it, same with tobacco.
No one can tell which product you are vaping, a fact not lost on airline passengers, I've been told.