For those of us with a poor grasp of time, who can still recall when a night at the pub could be sharply revisited by a Proustian wave of stale smoke arising from yesterday’s clothes, it can almost feel as if vaping crept up on us out of nowhere. One moment, it seemed, all the authorities had firmly agreed that Nick O’Teen was a creepy pusher hooking innocent kids on gaspers, and were pledging to legislate and tax cigarettes into oblivion; the next, great hordes of schoolchildren were apparently free to suck constantly on little vials of liquid nicotine with sugar-rush names such as Cherry Fizzle and Blue Razz Lemonade.
What happened? Regulators and legislators seem to have hung up a metaphorical ‘gone fishin’’ sign while Chinese vape factories cranked into overdrive, churning out boxes of sweet jitter juice marked ‘for export only’. Even Rishi Sunak’s much-vaunted Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which planned to place greater restrictions on the sale of vapes in the UK, has temporarily vanished with the general election. To understand how we got here, it’s worth listening to Backfired: The Vaping Wars, in which the hosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes chart the evolution of the technology and the habit in the US.
It began with defensible intentions. Two Stanford students, James Monsees and Adam Bowen, both cigarette smokers, set out to design a product that helped people like them to give up tobacco. They wanted to retain the ritual of smoking without the excessive health risks. Work began on a prototype vape which eventually evolved into ‘Juul’, the first e-cigarette to hit the mass market.
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