A long story by Matt Richtel in last Sunday's New York Times looks at what I have to believe is a disappearing culture. It's not about an old folk tradition in some mountain village or the practices of indigenous people in a remote corner of the Amazon. It's about indigenous, mom-and-pop e-cigarette stores–vape shops–in Oklahoma City.
For some reason, Oklahoma City has a disproportionate share of the nation's estimated 5,000 vape shops, and many of the people who run them–and their customers–are no friendlier toward cigarette makers than the U.S. Surgeon General's office. One 47-year-old ex-smoker who gave up smokes for vaping says he "now holds his head high" at his local church. "I feel like I'm one step closer to God," he says. "This takes the crime out of smoking."
I'm not sure what he means by that, but Richtel has captured something important in this story. E-cigarettes are not cigarettes, or replacements for cigarettes, exactly. They are something new. And the small businesses that have sprouted in Oklahoma City and elsewhere to sell the devices and the flavored liquid nicotine they run on find themselves in an interesting position, fearing tobacco industry encroachment on one side and government regulations on the other.
Richtel explores the interesting issues surrounding the regulation of vaping in the states and by the federal government, and why it matters whether these are classified as tobacco products or not. (The nicotine comes from tobacco.)
He also addresses the important issue of whether e-cigs are an aid for smoking cessation and whether they should be sold to kids. He doesn't say as much about these critical issues as I might like, but the Times has written about them in other installments in a series of four articles on e-cigarettes, three written by Richtel and one by Sabrina Tavernise.
As seems to be common in the Times, however, it's hard to find the stories. The Sunday print edition of the Times said "previous articles are at nytimes.com/businessday," but they aren't. (To be sure I wasn't missing them, I searched "cigarette" and "vape" and couldn't find either one.) The online version of the story does provide the links, but why can't readers go to a single cleanly designed page to find them all?
It's likely, in my view, that the big tobacco makers will wipe out the vape shops as e-cigarettes become more powerful. I also think it's likely that e-cigarettes–flavored with all kinds of things, including bubble gum, that clearly would appeal to children–could encourage more kids to smoke cigarettes. Richtel quotes Oklahoma's commissioner of health to the effect that the debate over e-cig regulation is "complicated by not yet having the science," but that's not entirely true. The studies are beginning to appear.
Even so, Richtel does a nice job here of explaining why vaping is growing so rapidly. Reporters will need to be careful, however, to remember that while this is an interesting moment in the long history of tobacco, e-cigarettes are not likely to improve public health.
-Paul Raeburn
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