Leave Society - Tao Lin (2021)

Leave Society is Tao Lin's fourth novel. The majority of his earlier work has been documented on this blog. The only major work I did not review is Trip, which is a non-fiction book about drugs and psychedelia. I was not sure I would be very interested in it, but after reading Leave Society, which would appear to carry forward many themes from that predecessor, I will certainly be checking it out. This is because Leave Society is a triumph and will be added to the "Best Books" list.

Lin's work has always been autobiographical, to one degree or another, though most often it appears to be "strictly." This novel is about Li, a novelist in his early 30's, who goes to visit his parents in Taipei for longer stretches of time, in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. These years are broken down into the four parts of the novel: Year of Mercury, Year of Pain, Year of Mountains, and Year of Unknown. The novel is a mixture of Li's visits with his parents, contrasted with his life in New York City in apartment 4K, which is somewhere around Chelsea, I think. His third novel has just been published and will soon be made into movie. He is separated from his wife and in the process of filing divorce papers. He stays with his parents for 10-12 weeks each year and "detoxifies." He practices celibacy for a prolonged period. He becomes a mediator between his parents, suggesting changes to their diet and medical regimens and attempting to bridge gaps in communication between them. He reads many books on fascinating subjects from esoteric sources. He pitches books, then later crafts and organizes them. He records a great deal of conversations with his parents, and transcribes them in this book. He wrestles with his relationship with his older brother and comes to understand him more deeply. He takes a good amount of LSD and ingests a good amount of cannabis and experiments with a variety of health foods and homeopathic cures. He spends time writing in Bobst Library. He tentatively, slowly enters a relationship, serving as a sort of climax for the novel. Finally it ends in Hawaii, on a rather mystical and perfect note, in accord with everything that came before it. 

There is a lot to talk about in this novel but the starting point must necessarily be Li's parents (simply known as Li's Dad and Li's Mom). The relationship between the three of them is so beautifully rendered that I cannot help but feel this book should also be adapted into a film, albeit one that is more widely-seen. It would be like an edgier version of The Farewell, except about parents instead of a grandmother, and a small family that is more intimately portrayed. It would require an excellently-trained dog for the part of Dudu, who turns 10 near the novel's end. But perhaps it would be too simple and monotonous for film. Even though "Best Books" are supposedly perfect (and though Flying Houses "grades" are inconsistent, no books have gotten A+ for a reason: A+ is not given out, it is reserved for something truly extraordinary that has yet to come along), there are always weaknesses, and the only weaknesses in this book are the sections of dialogue that are nearly meaningless. Yet these may also refer back to his earlier work, serving as a type of homage, and so even what I discern as weakness may be a deeper device. For example, what I remember as the most tedious pages of the book are later referred to near the end of the book, in the process of revising that scene--"how do you know that I don't know the fish are happy?"

This is taken from Zuangzhi, which concerns a student of Laozi (whom I had known as Lao Tzu). There are several other Chinese proverbs and sayings, such as "it's easier to change a dynasty than a personality." (51) My traveling companion found that one amusing, as I read this book over the second half of a trip through Italy (context matters). Or later, in one of the several moments that made me laugh out loud:

"Putting down his phone, Li's dad said, 'Calm water flows deep,' quoting someone from Three Kingdoms. Loud, talkative people were shallow, like river rapids, he explained. Deep people were quiet and still.
'I've never met anyone who talks as much as you,' said Li's mom. 

'The saying doesn't apply to me,' said Li's dad.

Thin Uncle said a Chinese proverb--empty wheat stalks, those who 'don't know,' stand tall, while those heavy with knowledge bend in humility." (327)

There is humor, and a touching family story within it, but Leave Society is a novel of ideas, and that is ultimately what sets it apart from Lin's earlier books. Taipei certainly hinted at his growth as a novelist, showing that he could write more mainstream books if he wanted to, and though Leave Society is inherently suspicious of "the mainstream," it presents the material read by Li throughout the course of the book in an almost-professorial tone, imbuing those ideas with authority. Ultimately those are the most important sections of the book, in that they move Li out of malaise and general unhappiness into awe and appreciation for all of the mysterious elements of existence.

This is no longer an advance copy, and the promotional materials do not read DO NOT QUOTE (as they did for "Shoplifting from American Apparel") and this review could contain a multitude of excerpts (I've marked at least six that inspired awe), but we will need to cut those down to two. There should be a 3 excerpt limit on FH reviews (and 1 should no longer be a requirement). That said, they are allowed to be long, like say, the first two pages of "Thyroid": 

"Four days later, twenty tabs of LSD arrived. On LSD at dinner, Li recorded himself telling his parents about the Younger Dryas, a period of time from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago that began and ended with global cataclysms, destroying, he'd read in books by Graham Hancock, at least one advanced civilization. 

'People were as advanced as we were in the eighteenth century,' said Li, and smiled at his mom, holding eye contact with startling, slightly nervous confidence; on LSD, he could be garrulous and extroverted, sharing thoughts, looking at eyes. 

He couldn't remember his mom's pre-surgery eyes. She'd looked perpetually surprised in Barcelona and Florida but had started to appear normal when he got to Taiwan for his current visit. 
'The same as we were in like 1780,' he said, sounding somewhat accusatory, as, to his rhetorical detriment, he usually did when telling his parents paradigm-changing information.

'Oh,' said Li's mom.

'They had ships and had mapped out the planet and were destroyed by pieces of a comet.'

'Whole world all destroyed,' said Li's mom.

'It hit mostly in North America, and there was almost no sunlight for a long time,' said Li, looking at his dad, who seemed preoccupied, eating and watching TV." (109-110) 

Li later says his interests were [not diverse, but] "similar in terms of being examples of dominant models being wrong in ways that distorted and simplified and disenchanted reality," (111) and the concept of acceptance of the "dominator" model of society (as opposed to the partnership model) weaves its way throughout the course of the book. It is as if Li is attempting to remove all traces of "dominator" thinking from his psyche, and give rise to more feminine ways of thinking. There is fair mention of "Yahweh," a female deity (conceived and worshipped before before the masculine heavenly Father) that has mostly been lost to history (see When God Was a Woman). Li does not have perfect self-control but he consistently tries to broker peace between feuding parties and displace hierarchies.

Li also goes on a certain health kick with homeopathic cures and experiments with fermented foods. He reflects on their effects, which are sometimes beneficial (Thyro-Gold), sometimes counter-productive (i.e. cayenne pepper capsules for a headache); on the being & existence & ancient civilizations & spirituality front, he provides appropriate citation and support for his discoveries. For example, talking about MK Ultra has pretty much become code for anti-vaxxers at this point. (I do not want to reflect on whether Li would choose to be vaccinated or not). The government is corrupt and evil and is force-feeding us chemicals to keep us under control. Sometimes, we cannot even bear to hear a person talk about such matters. Our brain shuts off as a defense mechanism against its own washing. Yet when Li reports on Karen Wetmore's memoir Surviving Evil and her discovery "that the CIA seemed to have killed around 1,200 mental patients at Vermont State Hospital, mostly or all women, in three decades of terminal experiments," (155) it feels more believable. Situated in the appropriate context, and reported by the appropriate authority, incredible beliefs become acceptable.

Really, none of these "disagreements with the mainstream" are nefarious. It is simply a question of whether the Sphinx is 4,500 years old, or 12,000 years old. He does become rather derisive towards his dad for taking statins. These types of conjectures and beliefs are harmless, coming as they do from a person that clearly favors the partnership model, rather than the dominator. There is a huge emphasis on communing with nature. But before we get there, one other set of crazy facts:

"Tesla's funding from J.P. Morgan was cut off when, according to one source, Morgan learned that Tesla wanted to give free electricity to everyone. Tesla lived in hotels for the last four decades of his life. When he died in 1943, the FBI confiscated his papers and equipment. 

Researching modern-day Teslas, Li found John Hutchison, a Canadian who began to experiment with electromagnetic radiation in 1951, when he was six. In 1979, on disability for agoraphobia, he discovered, while trying to replicate Tesla's work on wireless energy transmission, a set of phenomena that became known as the Hutchison Effect: using thirteen tons of equipment powered by a wall socket, he was able to levitate heavy objects, make metal rods wiggle and go transparent, heatlessly combust and melt metal, transmute elements, and create aurora-like clouds of light. 

Hutchison gave around seven hundred demonstrations, including one for the U.S. Army in 1983. Videos of his effects--which seemed to be generated by electromagnetic interferometry, the interfering of beams and fields of photons, and which to Li seemed close to gravity control, time travel, and other potentially history-ending capabilities--were widespread online. In 1990, the Canadian government confiscated most of Hutchison's lab--millions of dollars' worth of electrostatic generators, Tesla coils, and other things he'd amassed from junkyards and military surplus stores.

Hundreds of people, Li read in the Hutchison biography Mindbending and other books, had worked on free energy, inventing Moray devices, Hendershot generators, N-machines, and other overunity systems, which, like mitochondria, generated more energy than they consumed, but none of the inventions had reached mass production. It seemed that four trillion dollars a year in gas, coal, oil, and nuclear power; a century of investments in pipelines, electric grids, and other leaky infrastructure; and the addiction of energy corporations to monthly payments had led to the suppression--or at least the significant slowing of the development and use--of free energy." (252-253)

This is one of the more unbelievable facts reported in Leave Society but it is not one I would dismiss outright without further investigation. The idea of Leaving Society could mean a lot of different things, but it seems to center around the idea of forgetting everything you think you know. It is a slight variation on the confrontational adage "everything you know is wrong;" it advises the reader/adherent to rethink their basic assumptions about the world, to journey inward and find one's own personal truth, along with a set of beliefs that allows one to be free, uninhibited, and attuned to the reverberations of the deeper reality beyond the bubble in which we while away our lives in the service of profit. 

Society has constructed barriers between the individual and nature that have had the unfortunate effect of restricting our imaginations and compromising our bodies. And those barriers are, actually, physical--at the very least, Leave Society made me want to spend more time outdoors:

"At a waterfall at the bottom of Carp Mountain, Li learned of phytoncides (antimicrobial compounds given off by plants) and anions (molecules with extra electrons) from a dual-language sign calling them 'air vitamins crucial to mental and physical health.'

In his room that night, he read that forests, mountains, seashores, and waterfalls had tens of thousands of anions per cubic centimeter, countrysides had a thousand, city parks five hundred, city streets fifty, air-conditioned rooms zero to twenty-five, and that below a thousand impaired cognition and slowed physical recovery.

At dinner the next night, Li told his parents a Japanese study had found that cancer-killing lymphocytes and intracellular anticancer proteins showed increased activity for a week after trips to forests, or 'forest-bathing,' as it was called in Japan. The study was more evidence that the broken human-nature symbiosis caused cancer and other diseases.

'Then we should keep climbing mountains,' said Li's mom." (171-172)

There are other pleasures to be found in this book, such as a very sensitive and tentative romance in New York, and a climactic ending in Hawaii, but ultimately Leave Society is a book of ideas. It is, to be sure, a mechanistic method of autobiography: it is as though Li simply goes through his phone, checks the time-stamps on e-mails, and reconstructs his personal history over a period of roughly four years. The amount of material (given the details Li provides about the word counts in his rough drafts of each "Year") was staggering, and Lin has managed an impressive feat in whittling it down to the necessary elements: roughly, two parts intimate family story, one part history of ideas. The intimate family story is charming, sometimes tedious, and ultimately very moving--there is a sense of bittersweet sadness that comes with aging parents and the urge to create as many strong and lasting memories as we can, after moving beyond teenage angst and into adulthood, when we understand the sacrifices they made and the unconditional love they gave (if we are so lucky). It is the history of ideas, however, that will make me want to lend this book out to friends (never mind the fact that I have an unfortunate history of "friends" stealing books I lent them, including Eeeee Eee Eeee and "Shoplifting from American Apparel"). 

I recommend all of Tao Lin's books, with the caveat that everything before Taipei could be considered an "acquired taste." Taipei was excellent, and feels like a more traditional novel than Leave Society, but I would recommend this volume above them all. It encapsulates what makes Lin unique as a writer-- it pays homage to his earlier work, and builds upon that towards something greater and more universal. The book will provoke thought and discussion, and lead readers to discoveries never previously considered. It may make one rethink their cynicism towards alternative schools of thought. And it may open one up to observing this dazzling and magnificent world with awe, and living more gracefully within it. 

Grade: A

Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul - Jamie Ducharme (2021)

I quit cigarettes and started vaping on March 11, 2020. I bought a Suorin Air. That lasted me about 6 months. I then bought a Smok Novo II, which was recommended to me by the shop Vape Daze. When that one became unusable after about 6 months, the same shop recommended the Caliburn G to me. I have never tried a Juul.

Am I ashamed of this habit? Absolutely. Is vape juice more addictive than tobacco? Absolutely.

The reasons should be obvious. Though e-cigarettes are banned in as many places as regular cigarettes, it is easy to get away with vaping indoors. This removes the necessity of stepping outside for about five minutes whenever you want a fix. Instead, one can puff on a vape all day long, maybe even every minute of every waking hour. The nicotine buzz is strong, particularly if one uses a 50 mg (0.05% nicotine) strength juice. We want to presume that vaping is less dangerous than smoking, but really it has not been used for much more than a decade. It certainly made me cough, which certainly made those early months of the pandemic embarrassing and nerve-racking. Even now, I have a sore throat that has not really gone away for about 10 days, and it's quite possible I've developed cancer in a year. It seems rather clear to me that vaping poses just as many problems as smoking, and the only reason that I started was because it seemed more cost effective. 

And true, a 30 mg tube of nicotine salt (current flavor: iced grape, VGOD) runs about $15. This may last for a month, or maybe two. A 3-pack of coils runs for $15 as well, and a 2-pack of pods runs for $10. So for $40 one can vape for about 1-2 months (the Caliburn G device itself cost about $30). By contrast if one smokes, oh, say 2 packs per week (I generally tried to stick to 1), that will cost about $192 or so. Using a Juul is a bit more expensive than using an alternative device with alternative salts, but I would still estimate that that it is somewhat less expensive than traditional cigarettes (except, perhaps, in North Carolina). 

The flavors are the other thing. As of September 2020, flavored salts were outlawed in the City of Chicago. But it is not very difficult to get around that--one may merely drive outside of the city limits. And the flavors make it extra addictive. Regular cigarettes always gave me something of a queasy feeling, and the tobacco flavored salts were not much better. Menthols, or Camel Crush, became my choice until I made the switch. While I would not claim that clove cigarettes got me started (we knew not to inhale), they were undoubtedly more appealing. So imagine a clove cigarette that you could actually inhale and that would give you a super strong buzz and that was less expensive and that you could do indoors without stinking up the place and there you have the danger of vaping. 

Kurt Vonnegut remarked that he was committing suicide by cigarette, Pall Malls were his method of choice. I am not anti-vaping; I am simply noting that one should be allowed to pick their poison. However, I think the ultimate path towards curtailing this public health emergency is an outright ban--also on cigarettes. This is problematic due to the increasing legality of marijuana, a substance very many people consider less harmful, but which experience knows cannot be a healthy thing to do (at least if smoked). Truly, life is stressful and difficult, and we have our vices to make it more tolerable. Take them away, and you will anger a great many people, and if they want them enough, they will find them. Some people say the same thing about guns, but obviously, that is another conversation entirely.

***

Jamie Ducharme examines many of these difficult questions in Big Vape, and while I found the early parts of the book to be somewhat clumsy and perfunctory, it picks up steam in the middle and ends on a strong note. It is recommended for anybody interested in vaping, or the business of commercial vice. It is indeed a strange career to run an incredibly successful business, one that is considering an IPO, built around making it seem okay to do something incredibly harmful. The primary theme of that moral conundrum is, do not get kids hooked on nicotine. 

The opening is most interesting in describing the origins of the "safer cigarette" in "Smoke Without Fire." Ducharme begins by reciting the appropriate health dangers, and reflects on some of the increasing scrutiny (ultimately it becomes clear that her leitmotif is the parenthetical mention of an impeding 2021 or 2022 trial date in federal multi-state litigation against Juul) that cigarette companies faced when their products were unveiled to be dangerous. She then describes a revolutionary researcher.

"In the early 1960's, researchers at British American Tobacco (BAT), led by a man named Sir Charles Ellis, thought of a way they could go even further. Ellis's whole idea hinged on avoiding a process called combustion. Combustion happens when a cigarette is lit on fire and tobacco mixes with the oxygen in the air, producing smoke, ash and roughly seven thousand chemical by-products, some of which can lead to cancer. If BAT could develop a product that delivered nicotine without all the chemicals and by-products that made people sick, Ellis thought, it could keep many smokers from quitting. Nicotine, he reasoned, was relatively harmless on its own. Yes, it was a mild stimulant, and yes, it was addictive, but it had some benefits, too--like increasing concentration and focus while simultaneously soothing the nerves. Why not get smokers hooked on that alone, instead of on traditional cigarettes? Ellis's project was known internally as 'Ariel.'" (13-14)

First, a word on combustion. Does that mean every time we burn something with a lighter and inhale it, that's combustion? And people still think it is safe to smoke weed? I must be missing something. Perhaps its something in the tobacco or the filter, I digress. 

The "Ariel" failed because the company didn't see a way to sell it--but eventually R.J. Reynolds ("Premier" and "Eclipse") and Philip Morris ("Accord") each attempted to manufacture a safer cigarette as well. There is a brief mention of the snus phenomenon in Sweden, and there is no mention of any negative health effects of that product. Then, she describes the Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik, who gave birth to the modern e-cigarette in 2003. 

She then returns to the Juul team, which early on had started under a different name: Ploom. So maybe it is just the chapters with "Ploom" that I found less compelling. Regardless, it is an interesting story. The company was run more like a Silicon Valley startup than a tobacco company, and a great deal of this book deals with that dichotomy: when (spoiler alert) the company sells a good stake of itself to Altria, one of the largest cigarette companies, many of the employees consider it a betrayal, because they wanted to be part of something less morally-ambiguous. The two principals, Adam and James, seem to me like "startup tech bros," like the guys who started the HQ App, or the WeWork guy (both subjects of interesting podcasts and a solid documentary), amongst others. It's an interesting story but for some reason less compelling than some of the other later material.

But maybe this is just because I was reading the later part of the book while traveling, and had significantly more downtime in which to read. In any case, many sections tended to make me doze off. It was hard to read about this stuff, and when I told my traveling companion just a couple of things about the book (the later stuff, about the deaths, and Vitamin E acetate), they grew increasingly concerned about my habit and began to chide me for it. 

***

There is a certain comparison I want to make between this book and Grass Roots, though it is difficult because they are very different books. Both of the authors appear to be roughly the same age and are working in similar territory, but one is a journalist at Time, and expanded a long article (or several of them) into this book, and the other is a scholar with a Ph. D. in American Studies. I am no academic elitist, but I am inherently suspicious of "professional" writers. They exist in an incubator and have all the means at their disposal. I have no doubt that Big Vape has been a great success, though I tend to wonder whether the ultimate payout is any better than what I have been led to believe is the norm for almost all writers. But Grass Roots makes it onto the Best Books list and this does not, perhaps because it can't, because the story on vaping is happening so fast. 

Grass Roots walked a fine line between advocating for better marijuana reform laws and giving a fair (and non-condescending) voice to those against it entirely. Big Vape also walks a similar line between pro-vapers and anti-vapers (amusingly, most of the pro-vapers seem to be employed by NYU), but the issues are more clear-cut: are they just like cigarettes, or are they better? Do they make you die? Many people say no one has ever died from smoking weed (I doubt that can truly be the case) and many people believe that vaping is very bad for your health--maybe not quite as bad as smoking cigarettes, but certainly not harmless. There are many gray areas, and Ducharme does her best to assemble them in an accessible package, but the book feels oddly distanced, and focused on details of the company (rather than details of the industry/culture/phenomenon) that I found less compelling .

Don't misunderstand! There are great character portraits in each. The best in this case comes in Chapter 10, "The Boss," which is about Kevin Burns:

"Burns was a gregarious, straight-talking guy in his fifties, the sort of person you could easily picture holding a beer and flipping burgers at a backyard barbeque. He was a good-humored family man, married with two teenage children, but he also didn't take any bullshit. He didn't sugarcoat anything. His language colorful, peppered with choice words like idiots and mo-fos. He was also a workaholic with a reputation for building brands into winners.
Burns had most recently worked at the Greek yogurt company Chobani, by way of his private equity firm, TPG. In a financially desperate moment in 2014, the yogurt maker had turned to TPG for a $750 million loan. It also got Burns, who was known as a turnaround guru for struggling companies. Chobani's founder had reportedly called Burns to ask for his help while Burns was at an Easter Mass service with his family in April 2014. Burns not only picked up the call during the service, but also said yes. He spent a couple years at Chobani, helping improve its back-end processes and distribution capabilities. When he stepped down at the end of 2016, he left behind a booming business." (126)

Or in describing Siddharth Breja's whistle-blower complaint:

"The legal complaint painted Juul as a lawless company operating with no regard for public safety, under the authority of Kevin Burns, a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered CEO who proclaimed himself the 'king' of Juul. In the world described in Breja's lawsuit, Burns ruled with fear. 'Tell that motherfucker that I'll take him out of the room and shoot him with a shotgun if he challenges my decisions,' Burns once barked during an executive meeting, according to the complaint." (243)

Ducharme later contrasts Burns with his replacement in the CEO position, K.C. Crosthwaite, after the Altria takeover:

"If you had to draw a picture of the stereotypical American businessman, it would look an awful lot like K.C. Crosthwaite. The career Altria executive looked at home in a crisp suit, and he kept his brown hair cropped short. In his midforties, with wrinkles just starting to appear around his piercing blue eyes, he spoke as if reading straight from a media training document, rarely saying anything controversial. He was the polar opposite of colorful, casual, cursing Kevin Burns, who had frequently walked around Juul headquarters in jeans and soccer jackets. 'K.C. is a fundamentally boring person,' says one former Juul employee--and that seemed to be exactly the point. 'You don't want to have any personality about any of these people, and you don't want them to be in the news at all.' Crosthwaite would be the adult in the room, helping Juul right itself and win back the trust of regulators and the American public." (239)

Juul also owned Pax, which is a popular vaporizer that most people use for marijuana, and all of the details of the company's acquisitions and sales--along with founder James's plans for an app either to help people quit or to achieve the greatest possible cloud of vape--are minutely noted. Much of it concerns avoiding the appearance of impropriety--namely, marketing Juul to kids, which was incredibly difficult to avoid. Yet they also kind of sort of wanted kids to use it--but they could never say that. This is the conundrum that the tobacco industry faced, and continues to face, and it is a difficult moral question to assay: when can we sacrifice some element of public health in exchange for profits?

The answer should be "never," but there are a great number of industries (pharmaceuticals chief among them) where the answer is "always." Opioids are initially prescribed to help a patient through pain after some sort of operation, or as a response to a chronic condition, not unlike medical cannabis (though one is covered by insurers). It is permissible under certain conditions. So too is vaping generally preferred to smoking cigarettes. Yet Juul's founders made problematic statements early on: that they were just a replacement for cigarettes, that the company didn't create it to help people quit, but just to make a cigarette--which had declined in popularity for the younger generation--"cool" again. 

The founders did not address the possibility that vaping could become more addicting than smoking, and the book does discuss that in some detail--i.e. the very high nicotine content, 0.05% of the nic salts--and in this respect they are similar to opioids: the "cure" can sometimes be the greater harm. Just as vaping is viewed as "harm reduction," there is right now someone, somewhere, that is attempting to create a harm reduction product for vaping. 

***

The book picks up speed in the fateful year of 2019, and particularly in September of that year, which dealt multiple blows to the enterprise. Most insidiously, the EVALI crisis (E-cigarette or Vaping product use-Associated Lung Injury--a clumsy acronym, but rolls off the tongue) led to several deaths. Those became linked to so-called black market THC carts, and the specific ingredient of Vitamin E acetate (used to "water down" THC concentrate), and though Juul's nic salts do not contain it, the industry experiences a cataclysmic event. Cigarette sales went back up because people now thought they were safer than the alternative. And the scrutiny that D.C. lawmakers had been giving to the industry ramped even further up, to the point that President Trump made an address from the Oval Office declaring vaping an epidemic and public health emergency. There was not much follow-through on this vow to ban all non-tobacco-flavored vape juices, though, because Trump did not want to lose any voters.

It is hard to end a review summarizing this book, because this book is still being written. The last events detailed must have happened within months of publication. This is not unlike the slew of books written and released within months between 2016 and 2020 of various inner-dealings in the White House. I wasn't much interested in those books, though I thought I should have been for the purposes of this blog. The problem is that we can't fully contextualize something until we have seen it play out to its endgame. Vaping may, or may not, be here to stay. Vices shift. Tobacco is now much more expensive, and the age to purchase is now 21, and it is 100% harmful to health, we all seem to agree. There is more ambiguity about vaping, and it does appear that eventually all flavors will be banned (this is undoubtedly a selling point, a feature that essentially turns the product into clove cigarettes with a buzz). The price point for Juul is in line with current cigarettes (they did not market it as a less expensive alternative, but that is certainly the case for many non-Juul devices). Taxing them even higher is a possibility, but so is a partial or permanent ban. Much research is likely being done in this area, with many studies with many volunteers, and perhaps in a few years there will be more uniformity of opinion. The myriad lawsuits mentioned in this book from various states' Attorneys General should also test the industry. 

Perhaps then, this book may end up being more popular than Grass Roots because it is a live and current issue, and vapers are surprisingly passionate about their habit. It is something of an arts and crafts project (to design one's own mod), the addiction runs fierce, and one can still claim that it is less harmful than smoking. Marijuana regulation, to be sure, is still playing out in a different field, and there are distinct differences. Nicotine does not have positive health benefits, apart from mental concentration and temporary stress relief; there is less hostility towards THC and/or CBD, which most agree can be beneficial. Given the difficulties of writing about such a loaded topic, Ducharme deserves to be applauded. I might have done it differently--not quite as laser-focused on Juul, more about the industry than the company--but we see the whole of the industry through its most notorious player. I do not think this book will hold great interest for those without a vaper in their life, but it is a good starting point for an education in the industry. It will not tell you whether it is safe, but it will show you that, yes, now that e-cigarette companies are being taken over by Big Tobacco, Big Vape is simply an offshoot of the same.

Grade: B+