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I get it - I wish they weren't getting into the vape industry, for several reasons. I'm not that familiar with UK laws, but individual purchases like Altria's buy-in on juul don't come close to creating a monopoly. And anti-trust is the only real means of preventing such a purchase here.
I think buyers opinions, wants, trends, protests and campaigning can help steer it away from their grasp, I feel noise needs to be made, protests formalised and awareness raised now because we know they are doing all they can.
In Canada if you are an investor in that industry you are denied entry to the U.S, at least that's what's being reported.
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Addiction to different substances varies somewhat by individual. Caffeine and nicotine are somewhat comparable because they are both cheap and legal.
Never crossed my mind to blame anyone but myself for my smoking addiction. Frankly I don't trust BT and don't bother to read their literature but we could sure use the lobby money BT could bring to the table. IMO as a group we would be foolish to ignore this fact. There are so few vaper's who actually care about vaping as those of us on the forums do, we need monetary help to be heard.
I get it completely. At the same time I see another perspective as well. Altria bought a 35% stake in Juul for $13 billion so they are invested in vaping's future. Who knows what's coming down the line with FDA regulations/bans, what if big tobaccos resources and connections ultimately helps save the vaping industry in the US.
I've been on both sides of that fence, Letitia. At first, I thought it'd be great to have their lobbying resources on the side of vaping. But the more I think about it, I think they'll use that power to create regs that'll limit real competition, so that the innovation will disappear. And the legal market will be so narrow in a few years that only a few big players will be involved. I hope I'm wrong, because I think Altria-Juul is just the beginning of truly big money starting to take over.
That was done in the US. The result was a fund obstensibly to cover the cost of dying smokers but in practice goes almost entirely into advertising for various companies connected to the cigarette industry. :/
Good debate going here.
Bravo for keeping it lively yet civil.
Ok, so we vapers know that a vape device is not as harmful as a burning tobacco stick. If it were the days of Jefferson and Madison before 'extras' were tossed into cigarettes it would still be better because you are not inhaling carbon monoxide.
But, much of the outside world believe that vaping and smoking are at least the same. Some think vaping is worse, and at first I thought so too. It took a real hero to take a big drag from those early vape sticks with who knows what in the juice back then. Man, did those things hurt if you messed around and hit it too hard.
Vaping got started off on the wrong foot with all of those nasty e-cigs and then came the exploding vapes....then cloud chuckers. A lot was done to create a bad image early on. And now that Juul is seen as Joe Camel's evil twin Altria may have made a bad bet. For now it seems to be good for them. The future will tell what really happened.
Nowadays I am associated with folks who think helium ballons are the death of us all in 20 years. But whenever I pull out my little pod and blow out a whisp of pleasentary I hear "good for you sir, way to get away from those coffin nails"....
Whenever my brothers blows out a room filling cloud I whince in pain. When walking around at work with a Zenith clad JAC I hear "don't those things explode?"
Yet perception of the venerable pod or pen device generally is seem as harmless, even helpful as the nearby folks say "mmm, is that cotton candy flavor?"
Bravo for keeping it lively yet civil.
Ok, so we vapers know that a vape device is not as harmful as a burning tobacco stick. If it were the days of Jefferson and Madison before 'extras' were tossed into cigarettes it would still be better because you are not inhaling carbon monoxide.
But, much of the outside world believe that vaping and smoking are at least the same. Some think vaping is worse, and at first I thought so too. It took a real hero to take a big drag from those early vape sticks with who knows what in the juice back then. Man, did those things hurt if you messed around and hit it too hard.
Vaping got started off on the wrong foot with all of those nasty e-cigs and then came the exploding vapes....then cloud chuckers. A lot was done to create a bad image early on. And now that Juul is seen as Joe Camel's evil twin Altria may have made a bad bet. For now it seems to be good for them. The future will tell what really happened.
Nowadays I am associated with folks who think helium ballons are the death of us all in 20 years. But whenever I pull out my little pod and blow out a whisp of pleasentary I hear "good for you sir, way to get away from those coffin nails"....
Whenever my brothers blows out a room filling cloud I whince in pain. When walking around at work with a Zenith clad JAC I hear "don't those things explode?"
Yet perception of the venerable pod or pen device generally is seem as harmless, even helpful as the nearby folks say "mmm, is that cotton candy flavor?"
This is where the Two Sides of the Sword come in.
If we are talking about Vaping as it is Today, with the Interchangeable Choices of Hardware and e-Liquids that we have, then Yeah... BT helping to maintain that would be a Good Thing.
But is that in BT's Interest? Or more specifically, JUUL's?
Or is a Market where Hardware is Proprietary and Atomizers are Closed Systems/Non-Modifiable a better fit for BT/JUUL?
OK, so I read the OP, and then decided I was going to post a short:
What's the problem? "More scientists vape Juul..." quote,
And you beat me to it!
This is me, too. I don't blame them really, but I sure as hell don't TRUST them.
I want my juice clean. No BT juice for me. And they'll end up regulating the smaller juice makers out of the market. THAT is the big scare here.
I agree they will likely alter juice ingredients, but to fair isn't that what JUUL did as well? I diy my juice but when I didn't I made a point of not using juices that BT companies had a stake in.
OK, I'm going to come off anti-capitalist here (and I'm not, I just think capitalism has to be recognized for what it is)....
But it's the capitalist business model. WITH EVERYTHING. Add to that the fact that we're currently in an Oligarchy where the special-interests (read big money) control congress and the regulations.
It works that way with all other products, I don't see where vaping is any different. Hell, vaping is MORE PRONE to regulation because of tobacco history and nicotine addiction history. And like was said above, it's a double edged sword. We need to regulate it properly, yet the same institutions that create laws and enforce regulation can be used against us in the marketplace.
So without an eyes-wide-open approach, and without dispelling propaganda, we're screwed.
Sorry for the "politics". But the model here is well known and very predictable. Thankfully sites like ECF and the grass-roots vaping community can work to overcome the big-corporatist takeover and monopolization of the industry. I hope. ECF mostly "stays out of it" and just publishes facts. It's up to us in the USA to fight the regulators that are doing harm under the guise of "doing good".
If I were complaining about "any alteration to juice" you'd have a point.
But what I'm worried about is the more insidious alterations. For example, not being able to get juice without WTA's that make it more addictive in combination with the nic.
I don't even blame BT for the "reformulating and standardizing" of cigs, as long as it made a more uniform product. I don't care if they make them more uniform or if they up the nic level (I probably even smoked less due to that).
What I care about is the OTHER impacts. Of course, now-a-days cigs are mostly crap/scrap stems and paper and floor sweepings "reformulated" and junk tobacco. But that's another story, since I'm off them anyway. The days of decent tobacco are long gone.
So they sell crap, they sell lies, and they add all sorts of other chemicals. I want my juice made by ethical people, and I don't personally find BT to be very ethical or trustworthy. That's just my opinion and
. If Juul switched to nic salts and made a functional device in small form factor, fine. It works, obviously.
I don't know man, see I started smoking at age 12 and smoked for 22 years back in those days I could get smokes from vending machines, I didn't understand what addiction was and by the time I wanted to quit I couldn't, I spent thousands upon thousands trying to quit over the years and nothing helped, the same can be said for most of my childhood friends that almost all still smoke except about 2 who quit in their 20's.
One thing for sure is that there's no one size fits all when it comes to smoking, the experience is different for everyone.
Without doubt larger manufacturers benefit greatly from proprietary systems. This is more or less an axiom of capitalism. The problem is customers don’t. In a Truly free market which is an exceedingly rare thing, like the one we are experiencing at the moment, interchangeable systems provide advantage to consumers and smaller manufacturers. As this goes away, as it basically always does, the small manufacturers will disappear, leaving large manufacturers to foist proprietary higher priced lower quality equipment onto the public without any option but to buy it.
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