Is vaping about to go up in a cloud of smoke?

Oregon, California, Minnesota, Kansas, Illinois, and Indiana. Six states and seven deaths within a single month, all apparently linked to e-cigarettes in the United States.

The story throws up so many questions it’s little wonder why the responses across the public, politics, and industry have been so confusing. Vaping is one of those boom sectors throughout developed economies, offering a technological solution to nicotine addiction that removes so many of the dangers associated with combustible tobacco. Individual rights, government responsibilities, the power of markets, the hard logic of science, and political struggles are all at stake. Then we have the politics of the politics. When the subject reached the presidential level, last week, it achieved another level of confusion when this tea-total, non-smoking, and anti-drug president seemed to forget that he’d had a son with the First Lady.

“We can’t have our youth be so affected, and I’m hearing it, and that’s how the First Lady got involved,” he said before adding the twist. “She’s got a son, together, that’s a beautiful young man, and she feels very, very strongly about it.”

Advocates of clean living take note: it doesn’t always help.

Initially, the administration spoke about a total ban on “all flavoured e-cigarettes other than tobacco flavour” but the policy softened over the course of a few days. Flavoured vape would now require approval by the US Food and Drug Administration but it’s unsurprising that the messaging was still confused. Outside the White House, the response had ranged from puzzlement to hysteria, not least by those baffled by the President’s eagerness to ban flavoured e-cigarettes after six deaths (the seventh is more recent) while doing nothing about guns that kill many thousands. Trump, it is said, is now in the pocket of the e-cigarette lobby, given that former administration officials now work with Juul Labs, the company now most closely associated with teen vaping.

Cutting through the politics, however, the President was initially right to respond how he did. In a situation where some toxic ingredient is causing deaths, it seems entirely reasonable to ban vape liquid containing chemical additives for taste until the dangerous ingredient has been properly identified. Governor Andrew Cuomo has now issued a similar ban in New York and no doubt other states will follow, with Governor Gavin Newsom advocating the same for California. It might at first seem like government overreach in a moment of public hysteria but it’s quite clear that the demand for cheap vape liquid has exceeded the supply. The success of e-cigarettes has also exceeded the speed by which the US government could regulate them and impose the kind of rules that the EU enforced back in 2012 and tightened again with the Tobacco Products Directive in 2016. This cavernous gap has clearly been exploited by less-than-reputable parties producing black market liquids containing chemicals that are harmful when inhaled. (The main suspect is Vitamin E oil, often used in the perfume industry but not something you’d ever want to inhale given that the oil particles inflame the lungs and can cause lipoid pneumonia.)

A temporary ban, then, is reasonable but what comes next must surely be the recognition that vaping is big business in the United States. The fad is now more than a fashion and needs to be recognised as such, without the histrionics we’re currently witnessing from both sides of the debate. The science has remained clear throughout. While not entirely benign, vaping is hugely (not even marginally) less harmful than real cigarettes.

Some of the logic around that is, however, counter-intuitive and Donald Trump perhaps shares with the rest of us who neither smoke nor vape that understandable belief that the habit shouldn’t be made pleasant. The stench of burning tobacco was enough to stop people taking up that habit but there seems no barrier when it comes to vaping, where everything smells like Willy Wonka has muscled in. If so, then Trump might have a point. Smoking is conventionally associated with certain tastes and once you broaden those tastes to anything not based around tobacco, you start to widen their appeal.

Except, of course, that is precisely why e-cigarettes work. If you want to be pragmatic and reduce the serious effects of traditional cigarettes, then you should hope to reduce any barrier that prevents smokers from choosing to vape. As Public Health England advises, “there is no situation where it would be better for your health to continue smoking rather than switching completely to vaping.”

The U.S. clearly needs some regulation around a market that had proved incapable of keeping toxins out of the supply chain and moderate restrictions towards that end will probably pass with through Congress with little trouble. Beyond that, however, preventing wider advocacy for the habit, especially among the young, will be a matter of whether Trump and Republicans in the Senate have independence from the e-cigarette lobbyists. Even if the President sometimes has good instincts, problems come later once he’s held a few conversations with various advocates of the opposite position, as has been seen around immigration reform, firearms, abortion, and gender rights. For all the outward appearance of being distinct from the tobacco industry, vaping shares many of the familiar characteristics of that market, including the powerful lobbying mechanisms. Juul Labs controlled 75% of the U.S. vape market in 2018 and 35% of the company is owned by Philip Morris USA.

The issue is further complicated because, as with so much in Washington, it is already being politicised along familiar lines. Tobacco advocates suggest that the real problem with vaping is the common use of THC, the psychotropic chemical found in marijuana. Certainly, customisation and homemade liquids are a concern, but this really amounts to a not particularly subtle attempt to turn the argument into that same cultural fight between liberals and traditionalists. Given more liberal attitudes towards that drug and given the fight old tobacco made in favour of a properly harmful product, you can expect them to be emboldened as they seek to control new nicotine. It’s an indicator – a flavour, if you will – of what’s coming down the line.

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