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+
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