Look back in vapor: Shoddy Goods 067

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Hey, Jason Toon here, flipping through my own back pages for this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture. I’m usually a behind-the-curve kind of guy, but at least once I bumped into something in its infancy that went on to hit it big…

The cultural profile of vaping is pretty firm at this point, if sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, it’s a bit of a punchline, an easy device for comedy writers to give a character a touch of douchebaggery, like Chris on Family Guy. Or for drama writers to signify a character who’s going through some stuff, like Kate Winslet’s traumatized detective on Mare of Easttown. Yet this unsavory rep hasn’t kept the industry from growing, hitting $40 billion worldwide this year. And vapes have undoubtedly helped some smokers exchange cigarettes for a possibly somewhat less dangerous habit, kind of.

I happened to run into nicotine vaporizers very early on, when I covered the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for the Woot blog (RIP) in 2008 and 2009. Neither the manufacturers nor I used the terms “vape” or “vaping”: they would’ve sounded like something from a William Gibson novel. I thought I’d go back, dig up those now-deleted posts with the help of the Internet Archive, and see how my first impressions of vaping lined up with the reality that was to come.


This was before I knew enough to be embarrassed (about the vaping, not the hair)

If you don’t know CES, it’s a massive mega-gigunda gadget hypefest in Las Vegas over several days every January. For several years, Woot sent a team of us to blog about the show, relentlessly and remorselessly, to the tune of half a dozen posts per day. To say we were hungry for interesting material is like saying Brazilians are into soccer.

“Close enough”

So, in 2008, when I spotted a guy puffing away on what seemed to be some sort of cyber-Sharpie, I stopped to check out his booth. This thing was way bigger than a cigarette, and crowned with an orange LED. I asked him if he was allowed to smoke that here, and he told me he wasn’t smoking. Those clouds weren’t toxic cigarette smoke but harmless vapor! That’s how I met Njoy, the first vape I’d ever seen.

YouTuber Jake Ludington did a video interview that year at the same booth, where the unnamed Njoy rep touts the legality of vaping everywhere. “I can smoke this anywhere: on the airplane, I can smoke it in the CES show, in government buildings, and I can still enjoy my nicotine.”


About one-and-a-half out of three ain’t bad

Back then, I enjoyed the occasional cigarette bummed from someone else. But smoking had prematurely killed at least one member of my family, with more on the way. Had someone invented a harmless cigarette? Could I enjoy the nicotine rush and rich, mellow flavor without, you know, dying?

I took a drag of the Njoy myself - way too big of a drag, it turned out. Without the burn of smoke in my throat, I didn’t know when to stop. So the concentrated dose of nicotine made me nauseated and woozy. The taste was so-so; in my blog post about Njoy, I said “the artificial tobacco flavoring tastes like GPCs or some other generic smokes.”

But I was obviously into the concept, explaining Njoy as “a cigarette-shaped nicotine vaporizer that satisfies one’s jones without causing any inconvenient cancers, producing any nasty odors, or hurting those around you with secondhand smoke.” Then I just had to be a dick and say “But if smoking became harmless, what would the priggish scolds of the world do with their time?” Yeah, how dare those pushy anti-smokers try to save people’s lives?

My final verdict: “Not bad, if you’re off the real stuff like I am. I’d liken it to a good veggie burger - not the same, but close enough to the authentic experience… Now they just need to get these things into 7-11.”


What if a cigar was a robot? Still from Jake Ludington’s video at CES 2008

“That’s the story, anyway”

At next year’s CES, I discovered another vaporizer called the Greencig. As I wrote: “these nicotine vaporizers are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to their newsletter. So when I happened by the booth of Greenworld Technologies touting their Greencig vaporizer, I was puffing on that thing faster than Grandma climbing off her bingo-junket bus.”

Again, I wasn’t the only showgoer to take note. Photographer Jess Barron took some pics at the Greencig booth and wrote up her account of the encounter.

Green World, the makers of the Greencig, made all the same claims for their slimmer e-cig. “The idea is, it’s shaped like a cigarette,” I wrote, “it delivers nicotine like a cigarette, and it tastes (sorta) like a cigarette. But instead of inhaling the smoke from burning tobacco, you inhale tobacco-flavored, nicotine-laced water vapor, which is much less harmful to your health and much less obnoxious to those around you. That’s the story, anyway.”

Then I puffed myself up like E.F. Hutton and pontificated: “Alas, until somebody makes a huge investment in producing them in mass quantities, the cost is going to remain way too high to replace cigarettes for anybody but the most affluent consumers.”

I concluded: “Maybe the idea of a ‘safe cigarette’ isn’t just a beautiful dream. For now, the idea of a cheap safe cigarette still is.”

Little did I know…

The Vapening

It would take a few years, and investments by the likes of Sean “Napster” Parker and Peter “Antichrist” Thiel, but Njoy did eventually shrink both the size and the price of their vapes. They eNjoyed a few years of success, with their Njoy King topping the marketplace in 2013-2014. But the market got crowded and Njoy declared bankruptcy in 2016. They’re currently owned by Altria Group, parent company of Philip Morris.

That’s a better record than the one I preferred, the Greencig. All I could find about that was a skeletal company profile and a couple of Instagram accounts that hadn’t been updated in years.

I never did pick up the habit. These two instances remain the only times I ever vaped. Of course, vaping took off without me. Just not quite for the reasons I expected. Obviously, vaping was quickly banned from all the same spaces as smoking, so the whole “puff away at your daughter’s christening or your grand jury indictment” angle didn’t hold up. The relative health benefits, as I said, are mixed at best, but do account for at least some of the industry’s growth. (The growth of cannabis vapes is a different story for another time.)


This medical device now available in Blue Raspberry and Pumpkin Spice!

What I didn’t see coming was flavored vapes. The ones I tried only came in regular and menthol, not the kaleidoscope of sickly-sweet candy flavors, from pineapple to bubble gum to birthday cake, familiar to anyone who has ever walked past a bunch of teenagers on the street. No wonder there’s equally compelling evidence that vaping gets young people to start smoking as much as it gets older people to stop.

The big lesson I take from these old posts is that I’m as susceptible to the lure of something-for-nothing as anyone else. I nodded toward doubt in those pieces, but I mostly uncritically repeated the claims of the e-cig companies. Deep down, I really wanted to believe that a harmless cigarette could be real, that you could huff nicotine without any adverse effects. In hindsight, my credulousness induces a full-body cringe.

I fancy myself a hard-headed skeptic. But it’s easy to dismiss promises that aren’t offering anything you want. It’s easy to see the fallacies other people are falling for. The time you really need to stay skeptical is when someone’s telling you what you want to hear.

What’s your first memory of some now commonplace tech? We got an Apple II very early, but I was so young I don’t really remember not having it. I remember renting a movie in 1984 (Yentl, for some reason), where we had to rent the VCR as well. It took us forever to figure out how to rewind the thing. Let’s reminisce in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories are also less harmful than smoking, and not yet banned on airplanes or in government buildings:

What’s your first memory of some now common-place tech? We got an Apple II very early, but I was so young I don’t really remember not having it. I remember renting a movie in 1984 (Yentl, for some reason), where we had to rent the VCR as well. It took us forever to figure out how to rewind the thing.