Why is Juul worth $16B? It’s more like a cigarette than you think

1. Tobacco Cigarettes emerge as public health scare in the late 1990's.

2. McDonaldsization of Coffee via Starbucks in the late 1990's.

3. Cigarettes taxed and regulated with punishing costs and counter-media-manipulation.

4. Bindings introduced to market coffee with free wi-fi, boosting high-end coffee's incidental exposure to novice internet users at a time when caffeine is very-nearly required to negotiate the ever-expanding terrain of new technologies. (it's just good business, of course)

5. Millions of former nicotine addicts herded away from nicotine to expensive, premium high dose caffeine alternatives, serving as stimulant to wean many down off of nicotine cravings with new habits.

6. 20 years later, with ordinary tobacco cigarettes habits all-but-destroyed, across two generations of former users, and new technologies now well established, coffee habits can wind down. A mild campaign against coffee is introduced. See: acrylamide, poor stock performance, racial sensitivity incidents in liminal zones of large franchise chain restaurants.

7. Emerging technologies, now ready for maturity may be re-introduced with new players. These entities work to re-normalize a newly engineered and tested concept in managed synthetic addiction, with status symbol oriented marketing plays.

Why vaping is anything is beyond me, but I feel like this represents the fundamentals of a broader subversive program to phase out agricultural-plantation-oriented modes of daily-use otc psychoactives that play vital roles in common universal social norms that cut across a wide array of global cultural customs.

The big invention here is a one-liner: s/smoking/vaping/g.

I'm not saying that the The Verge or Rachel Becker have any intention of defending the tobacco industry from disruptive startups, not am I suggesting that vaping in general or Juul in specific aren't be problematic.

What I am saying is that there's an immense amount of money and effort is being deployed to ensure that people will defend the tobacco industry and will attack vaping, and it's always worth being extra cautious. "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is rarely a useful heuristic, but it's extra useless when you know there's a guy with a smoke machine around the corner. :)