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1. Smoking is everywhere

Run out of your favourite smokes? Chances are a re-up is only 5 minutes away. Heck, even pharmacies sell cigarettes - you try picking up your favourite vape from Walgreens. I’m right, aren’t I? It’s an easy life being a smoker. Until it kills you.

2. Smoking is easy

What’s to know? You put it in your mouth, set fire to it, take 12 puffs and you’re done. Vaping, not so much. let’s face it, there’s a learning curve to most vape that simply doesn’t exist with smoking. And do you know when to change a coil? Do you know when you’re done vaping? Isn’t having yet another thing to charge irritating? Smoking is really easy.

3.  Smoking is cool

You might think you look awesome vaping. Hey, maybe you do! But the reality is that vaping is not now and will never reach the glamorous heights that smoking once did. From the 40s to the 80s everyone smoked - movie

In February 2012 a Florida man, Tom Holloway, suffered extensive injuries after his vape device exploded, gaining the unfortunate distinction of being the first person to be injured by vape mod. By today’s standards, this device was primitive: it was a closed tube with a button on the side and a screw thread on the top to connect the atomizing unit. Variations on this same technology still in wide use, known as “mech mods” because they close the electrical circuit in a purely mechanical fashion.

This injury didn’t come as a surprise to many in the then small but fast-growing vape community. Indeed, E-Cigarette-Forum had tried to create a standard which would mitigate the fallout of so-called “thermal failures”; simple things like ensuring vents could allow explosive gasses to escape and be directed

An essay by Oliver Kershaw & Amelia Howard

There is a disconnect between the tobacco research community and the vape community. Both groups have almost totally divergent knowledge-base of the technology; the former based on its existing tobacco research agenda, the latter based on practical experience with the technology and through peer-learning and marketing.

We contend that vape is not an extension of the medical science paradigm or the tobacco control paradigm and, therefore, that the techniques used to (simultaneously) understand and tackle tobacco usage are wholly inappropriate in understanding vape. We are not saying that these established paradigms are illegitimate or irrelevant. But they do not work well when it comes to understanding user-driven technology, which, importantly, is also not an extension of the tobacco industry.

This has led to a continued and intractable divergence between the practice community

We don’t really know what Trump thinks about vaping, it wasn’t a major Presidential campaign issue. But we do know that he hates Government regulation: during the campaign he said that around 70% of Federal regulations could go under his Presidency. We also know that Tump allies in Congress like Duncan Hunter – the second Congressman to endorse Trump for President back in February – are big supporters of the vaping community.

So we don’t know whether getting the deeming regulation off the books is on the Trump list of priorities. If it is, we don’t

The inaugural US E-Cigarette Summit took place in Washington DC on Monday.

Encouragingly, there does now finally appear to be a consensus amongst the tobacco control community: Smokers should be encouraged to use vaping products if they’ve been unable to quit using FDA approved stuff. To many in the vaping industry, this will appear to be missing the wood for the trees, but that’s just the nature of consensus. It’s a net positive, and could not have occurred even a year ago.

But the vaping industry remains unrepresented in this discourse. Delegates at yesterday's Summit did not come away from the event with anything like an incremental understanding of the true nature and character of vaping. It just wasn’t in the room. The only industry present, either physically, or in the mind of the non-industry delegates, were the few larger players that are going through the PMTA motions.

Don’t misunderstand me – it's great that companies

As reported widely last week, Apple has told a British vaping website, Planet of the Vapes, that no more apps or app updates relating to vape will be allowed on the App Store.

Apple is known for its opacity when it comes to its business decisions, so don’t expect any explanation or justification for this.

Around the same time, news broke that Apple has patented a “vaporizer”. You can look at this patent elsewhere. This led many people to put two and two together and impugn a highly anti-competitive motive: Apple bans vape apps then moves in with its own iVape to corner the market. After all, is this the kind of thing Apple would do?

Well, maybe but of course, this isn’t what’s happening at all. Firstly, as Macobserver sleuth, Jeff Gamet, has shown that the application most likely relates to manufacturing processes. This is the type of thing the named inventor

The UK Government issued today its tobacco control plan entitled: “Towards a Smoke Free Future”. It’s a comprehensive review of anti-smoking policy objectives over the next five years and contains significant support for vapor innovation throughout.

As Clive Bates has pointed out, this makes the UK Government the first in the world to adopt an official tobacco harm reduction agenda.

The plan crystallizes the UK’s trajectory from almost prohibiting vapor products in 2010 to being the world’s most forward thinking and liberal on vape today.

It goes further too underscoring that vaping in public

The fifth E-Cigarette Summit took place at London’s Royal Society last Friday. For those interested in the true state of global science and regulations on vaping products (and, increasingly, other alternative nicotine products), the Summit is the calendar-event of note.

The following is my personal take on the overall themes, and I’ll start off with a TLDR listicle:

1. Vaping typically produces well under 5% of the HPHCs of smoking, likely even under 1%…..
2. With the important caveat that cloud-chasing type exposures have not been studied widely.
3. Regardless, it’s always possible that there’s an as-yet-unidentified interaction between those small quantities of HPHC that are present and which causes a problem…