CityState: Reporter l by Ellen Liberman
Up in Smoke
Can the e-cigarette industry survive mounting regulations?
Three hundred years ago, tobacco was only good for chewing,
cigar-chomping and growing as a temporary crop. But slavery made
tobacco farming profitable, the Bonsack machine mechanized
cigarette-making and cigarettes, with their ability to deliver highly
addictive nicotine more efficiently to the lungs and the brain, made
more smokers.
By January 1964, when United States Surgeon General Luther
Terry’s first report on the health hazards of smoking dominated
the news, nearly 42 percent of Americans ages eighteen years and
older — more than fifty-two million adults — smoked. In 2018,
that number plummeted to 14 percent because more smokers
quit, older smokers died and fewer Americans ever started.
Smoking has not been eradicated, but social attitudes toward
cigarettes changed from a sexy prop to a menace increasingly unwel-
come on the commons. Epidemiologists regard the steep decline in
smoking as a public health success story.
Inventors have been tinkering with electronic smoking devices
since the 1930s, but the modern e-cigarette — a battery-operated
device that heats a liquid solution into an aerosol that is inhaled —
ILLUSTRATION BY BRENDAN TOTTEN
was born in 2003. Four years later, sales took off in the same way
their predecessors did more than a century ago.
Vaping — a misnomer for gas produced by thermal process —
had its adult fans. In 2018, 3.2 percent reported using e-cigarettes.
But the real market growth was in the next generation. With the
sleek new design of Juul, the dominant brand on the market, and
fruity e-liquid flavors, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose
1,800 percent between 2011 and 2019, from 1.5 percent who had
vaped in the past 30 days to 27.5 percent.
By junior year, Mount Hope High School senior Sean Palumbo
found himself surrounded.
“Between ninth and tenth grade, a lot of kids were hitting the
Juul in classes, in the bathroom and passing them around at
lunches. Kids would hide it in their sweatshirts and no adult
teacher actually knew what they were doing,” Palumbo says. “In
eleventh grade, it became even bigger. It felt like more than half of
the school was vaping.”
In September, Rhode Island joined six other states and one
major city, San Francisco, in clamping down on vaping. Governor
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