In 2008, e-cigarettes were a twenty million-dollar industry. By 2015, sales had skyrocketed to $2.5 billion. Over 2.75 million Americans use them, and people across the globe have been swept up by the phenomenon. There are over 7,700 nicotine flavors on the market and over 460 brands of e-cigarettes. |
So How Do They Work?
E-cigarettes are billed as a way to smoke without tobacco. Instead of burning tobacco like a traditional cigarette, they vaporize a liquid nicotine vaping solution. Rather than inhaling smoke, users inhale steam. Vapers can swap out solution cartridges to vary the flavor of the vapor while using the same cigarette. Vaping solutions contain four essential ingredients: glycerin, propylene glycol, food flavorings, and nicotine. Nicotine is the active, addictive ingredient in tobacco smoke. Some vaping proponents claim that the nicotine in e-cigarettes can help smokers quit altogether by offering a cleaner source of nicotine. Critics argue that they are a gateway drug, attracting users toward more chemicals rather than the other way around. Electronic cigarettes have lithium-ion batteries that heat the nicotine solution when the user inhales. An atomizer inside the cigarette converts the heated solution into a vapor that the user breathes.
Where Did They Come From?
Although hookahs have been around for at least 400 years in the Middle East, they aren't forerunners of e-cigarettes because users inhale hookah smoke from burning tobacco. The early years of the vape began much later. In 1963, a man named Herbert Gilbert filed a patent on a device that heated nicotine, rather than tobacco, so that users could inhale the steam. Sadly, the product went up in smoke. Ten years later, Dr. Norman Jacobsen invented the Favor Cigarette and coined the term "vaping" to describe how users of his cigarette would inhale nicotine vapor rather than tobacco smoke. But the Favor Cigarettes didn't catch on, either. It was not until 2003 that vapes started spreading like wildfire. The Ruyan Company in China began manufacturing and distributing a product developed by one of its pharmacists, a man named Hon Lik. Ruyan marketed their vapes as a healthy alternative to traditional tobacco cigarettes. By 2007, the vaping craze had come to North America.
Finding an entirely safe way to smoke remains an elusive goal. One new type of product that's starting to gain popularity is called "steam stones." A cross between vaping and hookah, steam stones contain neither tobacco nor nicotine and are available in a variety of flavors. They are heated in a hookah, using either charcoal or an electric heating element (which is called e-charcoal, respectively). When heated, the stones release a vapor that users breathe out of a traditional hookah pipe. Some researchers have determined that when e-charcoal heats the stones, the resulting vapor is less dangerous than smoking tobacco. However, they still warn of the stones themselves possibly containing heavy metals like arsenic.
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