Something to keep in mind is that the tobacco industry has a ton of money, a demonstrated willingness to play dirty if needed, and a deeply vested interest in undermining companies like Juul. 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 sa…
What I see is people foolishly fighting the last war. Today's adults have been trained since early life on the evils of smoking and nicotine addiction and vice. We have this narrative of Big Tobacco pushing a product they claimed was safe and which was not. There are all these programmed mental circuits saying "if you don't like smoking, you should be suspicious of vaping."
And so at the beginning of vaping there was a lot of FUD about popcorn lung. Now there's FUD about kids getting hooked on Juul. Everybody's looking for the catch because last time there was a catch.
A future in which 20% of the population is forever hooked on vaping nicotine and no cigarettes are sold is a utopia compared to what we have now. Instead of embracing that future we have the anti-tobacco activists spreading alarm about vaping and all the old smoking laws being expanded to cover an activity that doesn't justify the ostracism.
I've never smoked or vaped and the laws have no effect on me. For a brief period I saw smokers switching when they could vape indoors. That advantage is disappearing.
We're missing a chance to kill cigarettes in the developed world. We should embrace the viral appeal of the vape fad before they become just another nicotine delivery device. We could save millions of lives.