Vaping was created as a safer alternative to smoking, but its popularity among teenagers has caused concerns among health professionals.
In this episode, we'll explore the rise of e-cigarettes, their health impacts, and the controversy surrounding their use among young people.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about vaping.
[00:00:25] It was billed as a solution to the world’s unstoppable addiction to smoking cigarettes, a way for people to stop smoking and get their nicotine hit in a safer, more healthy way.
[00:00:37] Countless lives would be saved, its creators and proponents proudly boasted.
[00:00:42] But, as we’ll see, it wouldn’t be quite so simple.
[00:00:46] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the rise of the vape.
[00:00:54] California has one of the lowest rates of smoking in the United States, second only to the Mormon hotspot of Utah.
[00:01:03] Fewer than 10% of Californians smoke, half that of cigarette-loving West Virginia.
[00:01:10] And in the design facility of California’s Stanford University, even 20 years ago, practically nobody smoked.
[00:01:19] To health-conscious Stanford students, smoking was a filthy habit, it was far from cool, and the few smokers there would be forced to go outside, far away from any university building to light up and get their nicotine hit.
[00:01:37] Two such students were James Monsees and Adam Bowen.
[00:01:42] They were both in their early 30s and were doing a Masters in Product Design at Stanford’s world-famous school of design.
[00:01:50] They had started smoking in their youth, and try as they might, neither could kick the habit.
[00:01:58] As two of the only smokers in their class, they often found themselves outside, puffing away during breaks from class.
[00:02:08] They talked about a plethora of different things, but they couldn’t shake the idea of designing a product that captured all of the things they liked about smoking–the ritual of smoking cigarettes and the physical feeling they got from doing so–but without the health risks that they both knew cigarette smoking posed.
[00:02:30] Now, before we get into what happened next, let’s just remind ourselves briefly about how smoking works.
[00:02:39] On a practical basis, the way smoking works is as follows.
[00:02:44] You light a cigarette, the dry tobacco leaves inside burn, releasing smoke which contains a chemical called nicotine.
[00:02:52] Nicotine is the so-called “good” bit, it’s the bit that can make you feel relaxed.
[00:02:58] But it’s also the addictive bit, it can create a physical dependence, leaving you wanting more.
[00:03:06] The problem with cigarette smoking isn’t the nicotine, though.
[00:03:10] It’s all the other stuff that comes in the smoke that contains the nicotine.
[00:03:15] The smoke contains tar and all sorts of other chemicals that can cause heart disease, lung cancer, and all manner of nasty stuff that kills almost 10 million people every single year.
[00:03:30] The nicotine itself, on its own, is not directly harmful.
[00:03:35] So, thought Monsees and Bowen, our two Stanford students, when puffing on their cigarettes, what if there were a way of creating a smoking-like experience where you got the nicotine but none of the dangerous stuff?
[00:03:50] They knew that burning tobacco and inhaling the nicotine-filled smoke that comes from it wasn’t the only way to get nicotine.
[00:03:58] It is actually relatively easy and cheap to extract nicotine from tobacco without creating any smoke.
[00:04:07] The process typically involves soaking the tobacco leaves in a solvent like water or alcohol to create a nicotine-infused solution.
[00:04:17] This solution is then processed to purify the nicotine, separating it from other harmful substances present in tobacco.
[00:04:25] And ta-da, you have purified nicotine, which can then be used in various forms, such as nicotine patches or chewing gum.
[00:04:35] It gives a nicotine hit, just like a cigarette, but without the tar and dangerous chemicals.
[00:04:43] However, as any smoker knows, and as Monsees and Bowen knew all too well, it isn’t the same.
[00:04:51] If putting a nicotine patch on or chewing nicotine gum gave you everything that smoking a cigarette does, then why did so few smokers do this? Why had nicotine patches and nicotine gum remained unpopular, only used in desperation by smokers trying to quit?
[00:05:11] Monsees and Bowen knew that a big part of the reason that smoking was so addictive was because of the ritual of smoking, the act of smoking itself.
[00:05:23] There is nothing fun or bonding about sticking on a nicotine patch, but–as Monsees and Bowen knew from the activity that had brought them together–the very act of smoking, of lighting up with a morning coffee or going for a cigarette break at university, and the very basic, perhaps even Freudian act of sticking something in your mouth and sucking it, this was what they knew they needed to recreate if they wanted to have any chance of weaning people off cigarette smoking.
[00:05:55] Now, this wasn’t a revolutionary idea by any means.
[00:06:00] The first concept for what would become known as the e-cigarette goes back to the 1960s, to a scrap metal dealer and heavy smoker himself, a man named Herbert A. Gilbert.
[00:06:13] He patented something called "a smokeless non-tobacco cigarette" that involved "replacing burning tobacco and paper with heated, moist, flavoured air".
[00:06:25] The problem was that it wasn’t clear how it would work in practice, and he couldn’t persuade any major tobacco company to invest in it.
[00:06:34] After all, it sounded complicated and this was before the famous surgeon general’s report that, yes, smoking might actually be bad for you.
[00:06:46] Tobacco companies back then had little incentive to create smoke-free cigarettes, because people were very content to smoke normal cigarettes, unaware of the multitude of health risks they presented.
[00:06:59] As awareness of the dangers of smoking increased, and tobacco companies realised that they wouldn’t be able to sell cigarettes forever, they started to sit up and take notice.
[00:07:11] The tobacco industry started to spend literally billions of dollars trying to create a smoke-free cigarette, but none managed to create anything viable.
[00:07:23] The American tobacco company RJR Nabisco tried to create a smokeless cigarette called the Premier, but it was a huge flop.
[00:07:33] It was difficult to use, it didn’t release as much nicotine, and it didn’t taste as good as a cigarette.
[00:07:41] If you have seen the film Barbarians At The Gate, you’ll remember that one of the criticisms of the Premier, which was passed verbatim right up to the boss of the company was, and I’m quoting directly, “this tastes like shit”.
[00:07:56] This was in the late 1980s, and it was the highest-profile flop.
[00:08:01] It wasn’t until the early 2000s that significant progress was made, and this was in the smoke-loving nation of China.
[00:08:10] A Chinese pharmacist and heavy smoker called Han Li built on the original idea for a smoke-free cigarette but gave it his own twist.
[00:08:20] The nicotine would be delivered by a tiny battery in the cigarette, heating nicotine-infused water and turning it into steam, which the user would then suck in, like they would suck in cigarette smoke.
[00:08:34] It was a big success but still, it wasn’t perfect. Indeed even its creator, Han Li, never managed to completely quit smoking, instead smoking both e-cigarettes and normal cigarettes.
[00:08:50] Now, we must cross the Pacific Ocean again and return to the Stanford School of Design.
[00:08:57] Monsees and Bowen got to work on designing a new type of e-cigarette.
[00:09:03] It was ugly and impractical at first.
[00:09:06] It was difficult to use, and required people to adjust various settings, check the temperature and replace bits of the devices.
[00:09:16] When compared to the incredibly simple and idiot-proof act of putting a cigarette in your mouth and clicking a lighter, it failed to take off.
[00:09:26] What’s more, their early designs were criticised because they could be easily modified to smoke marijuana, which, for a device that was trying to portray itself as a positive for public health, wasn’t a great look.
[00:09:40] However, they iterated and iterated, conducted tonnes of focus groups, and 8 years later the device they created would go on to be called Juul.
[00:09:52] You may well have heard of it, perhaps you've even tried a Juul yourself.
[00:09:57] It was revolutionary at the time in that it didn’t try to mimic every element of a cigarette.
[00:10:05] For starters, it didn’t try to look exactly like a cigarette, instead, it was shaped more like a mini USB stick, and looked sleek and futuristic.
[00:10:16] And Monsees and Bowen managed to get rid of all of the fiddly elements, the adjustable coils, the need to change batteries, and so on.
[00:10:26] Their new device could be recharged via USB, and all you needed to do was buy little cartridges containing the liquified nicotine, which came in all sorts of innocent and friendly-sounding flavours: peach was the most popular, but there was also cool cucumber and even creme brulee.
[00:10:46] And for those who wanted to try Juul but still wanted a cigarette-like taste, there was a Virginia Tobacco flavour.
[00:10:54] With Juul, they had succeeded in creating a device that people, finally, wanted to use.
[00:11:01] And, unlike previous e-cigarettes, it was incredibly effective at delivering nicotine, smokers, or vapers I guess we should say at this point, got a real hit of nicotine.
[00:11:15] As to how it worked, it was very similar to a cigarette.
[00:11:18] The user just needs to suck, this activates the battery and heats the e-liquid, creating a vapour, which contains the nicotine.
[00:11:29] It was an almost immediate success, with its founders passionately believing that they might just have invented the device that would stop people from smoking cigarettes, thereby saving literally millions of lives every year.
[00:11:44] They were forced to stop short of claiming that Juul was “safer”, but it was marketed as a cleaner alternative to smoking, and a way of getting smokers, like Monsees and Bowen, to kick the habit.
[00:11:59] But before long they found huge success with an unexpected section of society.
[00:12:06] Teenagers, high school students.
[00:12:09] According to one study, vaping among teenagers increased by 1,800% from 2011 to 2019. 14% of high school students vape, compared to less than 2% that smoke.
[00:12:27] Instead of vaping being primarily a way for adult smokers to stop smoking, what appeared to be happening was that teenagers who had never smoked before started vaping.
[00:12:41] There were all sorts of reasons for this. It was heavily promoted on social media by other teenagers, it was something you could do inside and quickly, and it was seen as cool and new.
[00:12:55] What was at this time still a bit of an unknown, though, were the health risks of vaping.
[00:13:01] Now, vaping was not smoking, it seemed safer than smoking cigarettes, but the long-term effects of vaping were unknown.
[00:13:11] Was it completely safe?
[00:13:13] Was it incredibly dangerous?
[00:13:15] Or was it somewhere in between?
[00:13:18] What was undeniable was that only a small proportion of the teenagers who vaped were aware of the fact that vaping contains nicotine.
[00:13:28] According to one report, 63% of teen Juul users said that they didn’t know the product contained nicotine.
[00:13:37] And it doesn’t just contain a little bit of nicotine, e-cigarettes, Juuls in particular, can have relatively high levels of nicotine.
[00:13:47] When you take into account how effective Juul is at delivering nicotine compared to cigarette smoking, one Juul pod has the same amount of nicotine as in a packet of cigarettes.
[00:14:01] And because of how easy it is to vape, to Juul, how you can do it inside, all the time, many young people were consuming very high levels of nicotine, sometimes the equivalent of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes every day.
[00:14:18] Soon enough, there were reports of teenagers being hospitalised with collapsed lungs after heavy use of vapes, which had often been modified or were using bootlegged, unofficial ingredients.
[00:14:31] Concerned parents wrote to schools and contacted local leaders, and in December 2018 vaping was declared an epidemic by the US Surgeon General.
[00:14:45] By this time, hundreds of other e-cigarette companies had popped up, but Juul was the clear market leader in the United States, with something like a 75% share of the market.
[00:14:58] Business was booming.
[00:15:01] In the same month that vaping was declared an epidemic, Juul also sold a 35% stake in the company to Altria, the company that owns cigarette brands such as Marlboro, for $12.5 billion.
[00:15:17] Overnight, Monsees and Bowen, the founders of Juul, were turned into billionaires, but this transaction caught the attention of the regulators.
[00:15:28] If Juul was an alternative to smoking, if they were the good guys, why did they sell to the bad guys?
[00:15:37] They used to bill themselves as anti-big tobacco, but now they were big tobacco.
[00:15:45] There was a series of investigations by the authorities, they were accused of marketing directly to children, huge fines were imposed on the company, and Juul was forced to make sweeping changes to the way it did business.
[00:15:59] Now, this episode is partly about Juul, because it was instrumental in the creation of the vaping industry, but we need to move on to talk about vaping and e-cigarettes more generally.
[00:16:13] How bad actually is it for your health?
[00:16:16] What sort of restrictions have governments placed on e-cigarettes and vaping, and how much should it be promoted, if at all, as an alternative to smoking?
[00:16:28] According to the British Public Health Service, e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than normal cigarettes, and the position of most national health services, including the World Health Organisation, is that using e-cigarettes is safer than traditional cigarettes.
[00:16:49] But, partially because of the negative press around vaping, talk of it becoming an epidemic and stories of addicted teenagers rushed to hospital with collapsed lungs, many smokers think it is more dangerous than it actually is.
[00:17:05] According to one survey from last year, 57% of cigarette smokers said that they thought vaping was equally or more harmful than smoking, while only 27% thought e-cigarettes were less harmful.
[00:17:22] In other words, smokers who might otherwise switch to vapes are not doing so because they believe that there are no health benefits from doing it.
[00:17:32] And it isn’t just individual smokers who are cautious about switching to e-cigarettes.
[00:17:37] In many countries, 34 at the last count, e-cigarettes are completely banned.
[00:17:45] Perhaps astonishingly, if you believe the view of the UK government that vaping is 95% less harmful than cigarette smoking, several of the countries that ban the sale of e-cigarettes have some of the world’s highest levels of cigarette smoking.
[00:18:01] In India, for example, 42% of adult men smoke, and smoking causes a million deaths a year.
[00:18:10] Turkey has practically the same prevalence of smoking, 42% of adult males, but e-cigarettes were banned in February 2020.
[00:18:20] Now, perfectly reasonably, these countries want to prevent young people from getting hooked on vapes, they fear that it could lead them to develop addictive tendencies, that it could lead them to start smoking cigarettes, and that there could also be unknown health consequences from e-cigarettes themselves.
[00:18:39] These are perfectly valid concerns.
[00:18:42] But vaping is a proven effective alternative to smoking, a way to get smokers to stop smoking cigarettes.
[00:18:50] It might not be completely safe, and the long-term effects are still not completely clear, but it is a whole lot less dangerous than smoking cigarettes, 20 times less dangerous if you believe the British Public Health Service.
[00:19:05] Ultimately, governments around the world want to reduce the percentage of their population that smokes, but there is a lack of consensus over the best way to do this.
[00:19:16] Is it by legalising and encouraging the use of e-cigarettes?
[00:19:20] Or is this a dangerous path that encourages teenagers to pick up an e-cigarette, which could lead to an addiction first to e-cigarettes, then cigarettes, and perhaps something more?
[00:19:32] The first Juul came out in 2015, almost 10 years ago now, and in 2024 there are an estimated almost 100 million people who use e-cigarettes.
[00:19:46] It is a lot, but it’s a fraction, less than 8%, of the 1.3 billion cigarette smokers around the world.
[00:19:56] To the greatest proponents of e-cigarettes, they have the potential to save literally hundreds of millions of lives and be one of the most effective public health tools of the 21st century.
[00:20:08] To their greatest critics, they threaten to hook a generation on nicotine products, and may well bring with them a plethora of unknown and unexpected health problems.
[00:20:20] Time will only tell which is right…
[00:20:24] OK then, that is it for today's episode on vaping, e-cigarettes, and Juul.
[00:20:30] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:20:33] Do you vape? If so, did you smoke cigarettes before, and how has vaping changed your cigarette consumption?
[00:20:40] What role do you think e-cigarettes should play, if any, in society?
[00:20:45] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:48] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:56] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:01] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about vaping.
[00:00:25] It was billed as a solution to the world’s unstoppable addiction to smoking cigarettes, a way for people to stop smoking and get their nicotine hit in a safer, more healthy way.
[00:00:37] Countless lives would be saved, its creators and proponents proudly boasted.
[00:00:42] But, as we’ll see, it wouldn’t be quite so simple.
[00:00:46] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the rise of the vape.
[00:00:54] California has one of the lowest rates of smoking in the United States, second only to the Mormon hotspot of Utah.
[00:01:03] Fewer than 10% of Californians smoke, half that of cigarette-loving West Virginia.
[00:01:10] And in the design facility of California’s Stanford University, even 20 years ago, practically nobody smoked.
[00:01:19] To health-conscious Stanford students, smoking was a filthy habit, it was far from cool, and the few smokers there would be forced to go outside, far away from any university building to light up and get their nicotine hit.
[00:01:37] Two such students were James Monsees and Adam Bowen.
[00:01:42] They were both in their early 30s and were doing a Masters in Product Design at Stanford’s world-famous school of design.
[00:01:50] They had started smoking in their youth, and try as they might, neither could kick the habit.
[00:01:58] As two of the only smokers in their class, they often found themselves outside, puffing away during breaks from class.
[00:02:08] They talked about a plethora of different things, but they couldn’t shake the idea of designing a product that captured all of the things they liked about smoking–the ritual of smoking cigarettes and the physical feeling they got from doing so–but without the health risks that they both knew cigarette smoking posed.
[00:02:30] Now, before we get into what happened next, let’s just remind ourselves briefly about how smoking works.
[00:02:39] On a practical basis, the way smoking works is as follows.
[00:02:44] You light a cigarette, the dry tobacco leaves inside burn, releasing smoke which contains a chemical called nicotine.
[00:02:52] Nicotine is the so-called “good” bit, it’s the bit that can make you feel relaxed.
[00:02:58] But it’s also the addictive bit, it can create a physical dependence, leaving you wanting more.
[00:03:06] The problem with cigarette smoking isn’t the nicotine, though.
[00:03:10] It’s all the other stuff that comes in the smoke that contains the nicotine.
[00:03:15] The smoke contains tar and all sorts of other chemicals that can cause heart disease, lung cancer, and all manner of nasty stuff that kills almost 10 million people every single year.
[00:03:30] The nicotine itself, on its own, is not directly harmful.
[00:03:35] So, thought Monsees and Bowen, our two Stanford students, when puffing on their cigarettes, what if there were a way of creating a smoking-like experience where you got the nicotine but none of the dangerous stuff?
[00:03:50] They knew that burning tobacco and inhaling the nicotine-filled smoke that comes from it wasn’t the only way to get nicotine.
[00:03:58] It is actually relatively easy and cheap to extract nicotine from tobacco without creating any smoke.
[00:04:07] The process typically involves soaking the tobacco leaves in a solvent like water or alcohol to create a nicotine-infused solution.
[00:04:17] This solution is then processed to purify the nicotine, separating it from other harmful substances present in tobacco.
[00:04:25] And ta-da, you have purified nicotine, which can then be used in various forms, such as nicotine patches or chewing gum.
[00:04:35] It gives a nicotine hit, just like a cigarette, but without the tar and dangerous chemicals.
[00:04:43] However, as any smoker knows, and as Monsees and Bowen knew all too well, it isn’t the same.
[00:04:51] If putting a nicotine patch on or chewing nicotine gum gave you everything that smoking a cigarette does, then why did so few smokers do this? Why had nicotine patches and nicotine gum remained unpopular, only used in desperation by smokers trying to quit?
[00:05:11] Monsees and Bowen knew that a big part of the reason that smoking was so addictive was because of the ritual of smoking, the act of smoking itself.
[00:05:23] There is nothing fun or bonding about sticking on a nicotine patch, but–as Monsees and Bowen knew from the activity that had brought them together–the very act of smoking, of lighting up with a morning coffee or going for a cigarette break at university, and the very basic, perhaps even Freudian act of sticking something in your mouth and sucking it, this was what they knew they needed to recreate if they wanted to have any chance of weaning people off cigarette smoking.
[00:05:55] Now, this wasn’t a revolutionary idea by any means.
[00:06:00] The first concept for what would become known as the e-cigarette goes back to the 1960s, to a scrap metal dealer and heavy smoker himself, a man named Herbert A. Gilbert.
[00:06:13] He patented something called "a smokeless non-tobacco cigarette" that involved "replacing burning tobacco and paper with heated, moist, flavoured air".
[00:06:25] The problem was that it wasn’t clear how it would work in practice, and he couldn’t persuade any major tobacco company to invest in it.
[00:06:34] After all, it sounded complicated and this was before the famous surgeon general’s report that, yes, smoking might actually be bad for you.
[00:06:46] Tobacco companies back then had little incentive to create smoke-free cigarettes, because people were very content to smoke normal cigarettes, unaware of the multitude of health risks they presented.
[00:06:59] As awareness of the dangers of smoking increased, and tobacco companies realised that they wouldn’t be able to sell cigarettes forever, they started to sit up and take notice.
[00:07:11] The tobacco industry started to spend literally billions of dollars trying to create a smoke-free cigarette, but none managed to create anything viable.
[00:07:23] The American tobacco company RJR Nabisco tried to create a smokeless cigarette called the Premier, but it was a huge flop.
[00:07:33] It was difficult to use, it didn’t release as much nicotine, and it didn’t taste as good as a cigarette.
[00:07:41] If you have seen the film Barbarians At The Gate, you’ll remember that one of the criticisms of the Premier, which was passed verbatim right up to the boss of the company was, and I’m quoting directly, “this tastes like shit”.
[00:07:56] This was in the late 1980s, and it was the highest-profile flop.
[00:08:01] It wasn’t until the early 2000s that significant progress was made, and this was in the smoke-loving nation of China.
[00:08:10] A Chinese pharmacist and heavy smoker called Han Li built on the original idea for a smoke-free cigarette but gave it his own twist.
[00:08:20] The nicotine would be delivered by a tiny battery in the cigarette, heating nicotine-infused water and turning it into steam, which the user would then suck in, like they would suck in cigarette smoke.
[00:08:34] It was a big success but still, it wasn’t perfect. Indeed even its creator, Han Li, never managed to completely quit smoking, instead smoking both e-cigarettes and normal cigarettes.
[00:08:50] Now, we must cross the Pacific Ocean again and return to the Stanford School of Design.
[00:08:57] Monsees and Bowen got to work on designing a new type of e-cigarette.
[00:09:03] It was ugly and impractical at first.
[00:09:06] It was difficult to use, and required people to adjust various settings, check the temperature and replace bits of the devices.
[00:09:16] When compared to the incredibly simple and idiot-proof act of putting a cigarette in your mouth and clicking a lighter, it failed to take off.
[00:09:26] What’s more, their early designs were criticised because they could be easily modified to smoke marijuana, which, for a device that was trying to portray itself as a positive for public health, wasn’t a great look.
[00:09:40] However, they iterated and iterated, conducted tonnes of focus groups, and 8 years later the device they created would go on to be called Juul.
[00:09:52] You may well have heard of it, perhaps you've even tried a Juul yourself.
[00:09:57] It was revolutionary at the time in that it didn’t try to mimic every element of a cigarette.
[00:10:05] For starters, it didn’t try to look exactly like a cigarette, instead, it was shaped more like a mini USB stick, and looked sleek and futuristic.
[00:10:16] And Monsees and Bowen managed to get rid of all of the fiddly elements, the adjustable coils, the need to change batteries, and so on.
[00:10:26] Their new device could be recharged via USB, and all you needed to do was buy little cartridges containing the liquified nicotine, which came in all sorts of innocent and friendly-sounding flavours: peach was the most popular, but there was also cool cucumber and even creme brulee.
[00:10:46] And for those who wanted to try Juul but still wanted a cigarette-like taste, there was a Virginia Tobacco flavour.
[00:10:54] With Juul, they had succeeded in creating a device that people, finally, wanted to use.
[00:11:01] And, unlike previous e-cigarettes, it was incredibly effective at delivering nicotine, smokers, or vapers I guess we should say at this point, got a real hit of nicotine.
[00:11:15] As to how it worked, it was very similar to a cigarette.
[00:11:18] The user just needs to suck, this activates the battery and heats the e-liquid, creating a vapour, which contains the nicotine.
[00:11:29] It was an almost immediate success, with its founders passionately believing that they might just have invented the device that would stop people from smoking cigarettes, thereby saving literally millions of lives every year.
[00:11:44] They were forced to stop short of claiming that Juul was “safer”, but it was marketed as a cleaner alternative to smoking, and a way of getting smokers, like Monsees and Bowen, to kick the habit.
[00:11:59] But before long they found huge success with an unexpected section of society.
[00:12:06] Teenagers, high school students.
[00:12:09] According to one study, vaping among teenagers increased by 1,800% from 2011 to 2019. 14% of high school students vape, compared to less than 2% that smoke.
[00:12:27] Instead of vaping being primarily a way for adult smokers to stop smoking, what appeared to be happening was that teenagers who had never smoked before started vaping.
[00:12:41] There were all sorts of reasons for this. It was heavily promoted on social media by other teenagers, it was something you could do inside and quickly, and it was seen as cool and new.
[00:12:55] What was at this time still a bit of an unknown, though, were the health risks of vaping.
[00:13:01] Now, vaping was not smoking, it seemed safer than smoking cigarettes, but the long-term effects of vaping were unknown.
[00:13:11] Was it completely safe?
[00:13:13] Was it incredibly dangerous?
[00:13:15] Or was it somewhere in between?
[00:13:18] What was undeniable was that only a small proportion of the teenagers who vaped were aware of the fact that vaping contains nicotine.
[00:13:28] According to one report, 63% of teen Juul users said that they didn’t know the product contained nicotine.
[00:13:37] And it doesn’t just contain a little bit of nicotine, e-cigarettes, Juuls in particular, can have relatively high levels of nicotine.
[00:13:47] When you take into account how effective Juul is at delivering nicotine compared to cigarette smoking, one Juul pod has the same amount of nicotine as in a packet of cigarettes.
[00:14:01] And because of how easy it is to vape, to Juul, how you can do it inside, all the time, many young people were consuming very high levels of nicotine, sometimes the equivalent of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes every day.
[00:14:18] Soon enough, there were reports of teenagers being hospitalised with collapsed lungs after heavy use of vapes, which had often been modified or were using bootlegged, unofficial ingredients.
[00:14:31] Concerned parents wrote to schools and contacted local leaders, and in December 2018 vaping was declared an epidemic by the US Surgeon General.
[00:14:45] By this time, hundreds of other e-cigarette companies had popped up, but Juul was the clear market leader in the United States, with something like a 75% share of the market.
[00:14:58] Business was booming.
[00:15:01] In the same month that vaping was declared an epidemic, Juul also sold a 35% stake in the company to Altria, the company that owns cigarette brands such as Marlboro, for $12.5 billion.
[00:15:17] Overnight, Monsees and Bowen, the founders of Juul, were turned into billionaires, but this transaction caught the attention of the regulators.
[00:15:28] If Juul was an alternative to smoking, if they were the good guys, why did they sell to the bad guys?
[00:15:37] They used to bill themselves as anti-big tobacco, but now they were big tobacco.
[00:15:45] There was a series of investigations by the authorities, they were accused of marketing directly to children, huge fines were imposed on the company, and Juul was forced to make sweeping changes to the way it did business.
[00:15:59] Now, this episode is partly about Juul, because it was instrumental in the creation of the vaping industry, but we need to move on to talk about vaping and e-cigarettes more generally.
[00:16:13] How bad actually is it for your health?
[00:16:16] What sort of restrictions have governments placed on e-cigarettes and vaping, and how much should it be promoted, if at all, as an alternative to smoking?
[00:16:28] According to the British Public Health Service, e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than normal cigarettes, and the position of most national health services, including the World Health Organisation, is that using e-cigarettes is safer than traditional cigarettes.
[00:16:49] But, partially because of the negative press around vaping, talk of it becoming an epidemic and stories of addicted teenagers rushed to hospital with collapsed lungs, many smokers think it is more dangerous than it actually is.
[00:17:05] According to one survey from last year, 57% of cigarette smokers said that they thought vaping was equally or more harmful than smoking, while only 27% thought e-cigarettes were less harmful.
[00:17:22] In other words, smokers who might otherwise switch to vapes are not doing so because they believe that there are no health benefits from doing it.
[00:17:32] And it isn’t just individual smokers who are cautious about switching to e-cigarettes.
[00:17:37] In many countries, 34 at the last count, e-cigarettes are completely banned.
[00:17:45] Perhaps astonishingly, if you believe the view of the UK government that vaping is 95% less harmful than cigarette smoking, several of the countries that ban the sale of e-cigarettes have some of the world’s highest levels of cigarette smoking.
[00:18:01] In India, for example, 42% of adult men smoke, and smoking causes a million deaths a year.
[00:18:10] Turkey has practically the same prevalence of smoking, 42% of adult males, but e-cigarettes were banned in February 2020.
[00:18:20] Now, perfectly reasonably, these countries want to prevent young people from getting hooked on vapes, they fear that it could lead them to develop addictive tendencies, that it could lead them to start smoking cigarettes, and that there could also be unknown health consequences from e-cigarettes themselves.
[00:18:39] These are perfectly valid concerns.
[00:18:42] But vaping is a proven effective alternative to smoking, a way to get smokers to stop smoking cigarettes.
[00:18:50] It might not be completely safe, and the long-term effects are still not completely clear, but it is a whole lot less dangerous than smoking cigarettes, 20 times less dangerous if you believe the British Public Health Service.
[00:19:05] Ultimately, governments around the world want to reduce the percentage of their population that smokes, but there is a lack of consensus over the best way to do this.
[00:19:16] Is it by legalising and encouraging the use of e-cigarettes?
[00:19:20] Or is this a dangerous path that encourages teenagers to pick up an e-cigarette, which could lead to an addiction first to e-cigarettes, then cigarettes, and perhaps something more?
[00:19:32] The first Juul came out in 2015, almost 10 years ago now, and in 2024 there are an estimated almost 100 million people who use e-cigarettes.
[00:19:46] It is a lot, but it’s a fraction, less than 8%, of the 1.3 billion cigarette smokers around the world.
[00:19:56] To the greatest proponents of e-cigarettes, they have the potential to save literally hundreds of millions of lives and be one of the most effective public health tools of the 21st century.
[00:20:08] To their greatest critics, they threaten to hook a generation on nicotine products, and may well bring with them a plethora of unknown and unexpected health problems.
[00:20:20] Time will only tell which is right…
[00:20:24] OK then, that is it for today's episode on vaping, e-cigarettes, and Juul.
[00:20:30] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:20:33] Do you vape? If so, did you smoke cigarettes before, and how has vaping changed your cigarette consumption?
[00:20:40] What role do you think e-cigarettes should play, if any, in society?
[00:20:45] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:48] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:56] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:01] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about vaping.
[00:00:25] It was billed as a solution to the world’s unstoppable addiction to smoking cigarettes, a way for people to stop smoking and get their nicotine hit in a safer, more healthy way.
[00:00:37] Countless lives would be saved, its creators and proponents proudly boasted.
[00:00:42] But, as we’ll see, it wouldn’t be quite so simple.
[00:00:46] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the rise of the vape.
[00:00:54] California has one of the lowest rates of smoking in the United States, second only to the Mormon hotspot of Utah.
[00:01:03] Fewer than 10% of Californians smoke, half that of cigarette-loving West Virginia.
[00:01:10] And in the design facility of California’s Stanford University, even 20 years ago, practically nobody smoked.
[00:01:19] To health-conscious Stanford students, smoking was a filthy habit, it was far from cool, and the few smokers there would be forced to go outside, far away from any university building to light up and get their nicotine hit.
[00:01:37] Two such students were James Monsees and Adam Bowen.
[00:01:42] They were both in their early 30s and were doing a Masters in Product Design at Stanford’s world-famous school of design.
[00:01:50] They had started smoking in their youth, and try as they might, neither could kick the habit.
[00:01:58] As two of the only smokers in their class, they often found themselves outside, puffing away during breaks from class.
[00:02:08] They talked about a plethora of different things, but they couldn’t shake the idea of designing a product that captured all of the things they liked about smoking–the ritual of smoking cigarettes and the physical feeling they got from doing so–but without the health risks that they both knew cigarette smoking posed.
[00:02:30] Now, before we get into what happened next, let’s just remind ourselves briefly about how smoking works.
[00:02:39] On a practical basis, the way smoking works is as follows.
[00:02:44] You light a cigarette, the dry tobacco leaves inside burn, releasing smoke which contains a chemical called nicotine.
[00:02:52] Nicotine is the so-called “good” bit, it’s the bit that can make you feel relaxed.
[00:02:58] But it’s also the addictive bit, it can create a physical dependence, leaving you wanting more.
[00:03:06] The problem with cigarette smoking isn’t the nicotine, though.
[00:03:10] It’s all the other stuff that comes in the smoke that contains the nicotine.
[00:03:15] The smoke contains tar and all sorts of other chemicals that can cause heart disease, lung cancer, and all manner of nasty stuff that kills almost 10 million people every single year.
[00:03:30] The nicotine itself, on its own, is not directly harmful.
[00:03:35] So, thought Monsees and Bowen, our two Stanford students, when puffing on their cigarettes, what if there were a way of creating a smoking-like experience where you got the nicotine but none of the dangerous stuff?
[00:03:50] They knew that burning tobacco and inhaling the nicotine-filled smoke that comes from it wasn’t the only way to get nicotine.
[00:03:58] It is actually relatively easy and cheap to extract nicotine from tobacco without creating any smoke.
[00:04:07] The process typically involves soaking the tobacco leaves in a solvent like water or alcohol to create a nicotine-infused solution.
[00:04:17] This solution is then processed to purify the nicotine, separating it from other harmful substances present in tobacco.
[00:04:25] And ta-da, you have purified nicotine, which can then be used in various forms, such as nicotine patches or chewing gum.
[00:04:35] It gives a nicotine hit, just like a cigarette, but without the tar and dangerous chemicals.
[00:04:43] However, as any smoker knows, and as Monsees and Bowen knew all too well, it isn’t the same.
[00:04:51] If putting a nicotine patch on or chewing nicotine gum gave you everything that smoking a cigarette does, then why did so few smokers do this? Why had nicotine patches and nicotine gum remained unpopular, only used in desperation by smokers trying to quit?
[00:05:11] Monsees and Bowen knew that a big part of the reason that smoking was so addictive was because of the ritual of smoking, the act of smoking itself.
[00:05:23] There is nothing fun or bonding about sticking on a nicotine patch, but–as Monsees and Bowen knew from the activity that had brought them together–the very act of smoking, of lighting up with a morning coffee or going for a cigarette break at university, and the very basic, perhaps even Freudian act of sticking something in your mouth and sucking it, this was what they knew they needed to recreate if they wanted to have any chance of weaning people off cigarette smoking.
[00:05:55] Now, this wasn’t a revolutionary idea by any means.
[00:06:00] The first concept for what would become known as the e-cigarette goes back to the 1960s, to a scrap metal dealer and heavy smoker himself, a man named Herbert A. Gilbert.
[00:06:13] He patented something called "a smokeless non-tobacco cigarette" that involved "replacing burning tobacco and paper with heated, moist, flavoured air".
[00:06:25] The problem was that it wasn’t clear how it would work in practice, and he couldn’t persuade any major tobacco company to invest in it.
[00:06:34] After all, it sounded complicated and this was before the famous surgeon general’s report that, yes, smoking might actually be bad for you.
[00:06:46] Tobacco companies back then had little incentive to create smoke-free cigarettes, because people were very content to smoke normal cigarettes, unaware of the multitude of health risks they presented.
[00:06:59] As awareness of the dangers of smoking increased, and tobacco companies realised that they wouldn’t be able to sell cigarettes forever, they started to sit up and take notice.
[00:07:11] The tobacco industry started to spend literally billions of dollars trying to create a smoke-free cigarette, but none managed to create anything viable.
[00:07:23] The American tobacco company RJR Nabisco tried to create a smokeless cigarette called the Premier, but it was a huge flop.
[00:07:33] It was difficult to use, it didn’t release as much nicotine, and it didn’t taste as good as a cigarette.
[00:07:41] If you have seen the film Barbarians At The Gate, you’ll remember that one of the criticisms of the Premier, which was passed verbatim right up to the boss of the company was, and I’m quoting directly, “this tastes like shit”.
[00:07:56] This was in the late 1980s, and it was the highest-profile flop.
[00:08:01] It wasn’t until the early 2000s that significant progress was made, and this was in the smoke-loving nation of China.
[00:08:10] A Chinese pharmacist and heavy smoker called Han Li built on the original idea for a smoke-free cigarette but gave it his own twist.
[00:08:20] The nicotine would be delivered by a tiny battery in the cigarette, heating nicotine-infused water and turning it into steam, which the user would then suck in, like they would suck in cigarette smoke.
[00:08:34] It was a big success but still, it wasn’t perfect. Indeed even its creator, Han Li, never managed to completely quit smoking, instead smoking both e-cigarettes and normal cigarettes.
[00:08:50] Now, we must cross the Pacific Ocean again and return to the Stanford School of Design.
[00:08:57] Monsees and Bowen got to work on designing a new type of e-cigarette.
[00:09:03] It was ugly and impractical at first.
[00:09:06] It was difficult to use, and required people to adjust various settings, check the temperature and replace bits of the devices.
[00:09:16] When compared to the incredibly simple and idiot-proof act of putting a cigarette in your mouth and clicking a lighter, it failed to take off.
[00:09:26] What’s more, their early designs were criticised because they could be easily modified to smoke marijuana, which, for a device that was trying to portray itself as a positive for public health, wasn’t a great look.
[00:09:40] However, they iterated and iterated, conducted tonnes of focus groups, and 8 years later the device they created would go on to be called Juul.
[00:09:52] You may well have heard of it, perhaps you've even tried a Juul yourself.
[00:09:57] It was revolutionary at the time in that it didn’t try to mimic every element of a cigarette.
[00:10:05] For starters, it didn’t try to look exactly like a cigarette, instead, it was shaped more like a mini USB stick, and looked sleek and futuristic.
[00:10:16] And Monsees and Bowen managed to get rid of all of the fiddly elements, the adjustable coils, the need to change batteries, and so on.
[00:10:26] Their new device could be recharged via USB, and all you needed to do was buy little cartridges containing the liquified nicotine, which came in all sorts of innocent and friendly-sounding flavours: peach was the most popular, but there was also cool cucumber and even creme brulee.
[00:10:46] And for those who wanted to try Juul but still wanted a cigarette-like taste, there was a Virginia Tobacco flavour.
[00:10:54] With Juul, they had succeeded in creating a device that people, finally, wanted to use.
[00:11:01] And, unlike previous e-cigarettes, it was incredibly effective at delivering nicotine, smokers, or vapers I guess we should say at this point, got a real hit of nicotine.
[00:11:15] As to how it worked, it was very similar to a cigarette.
[00:11:18] The user just needs to suck, this activates the battery and heats the e-liquid, creating a vapour, which contains the nicotine.
[00:11:29] It was an almost immediate success, with its founders passionately believing that they might just have invented the device that would stop people from smoking cigarettes, thereby saving literally millions of lives every year.
[00:11:44] They were forced to stop short of claiming that Juul was “safer”, but it was marketed as a cleaner alternative to smoking, and a way of getting smokers, like Monsees and Bowen, to kick the habit.
[00:11:59] But before long they found huge success with an unexpected section of society.
[00:12:06] Teenagers, high school students.
[00:12:09] According to one study, vaping among teenagers increased by 1,800% from 2011 to 2019. 14% of high school students vape, compared to less than 2% that smoke.
[00:12:27] Instead of vaping being primarily a way for adult smokers to stop smoking, what appeared to be happening was that teenagers who had never smoked before started vaping.
[00:12:41] There were all sorts of reasons for this. It was heavily promoted on social media by other teenagers, it was something you could do inside and quickly, and it was seen as cool and new.
[00:12:55] What was at this time still a bit of an unknown, though, were the health risks of vaping.
[00:13:01] Now, vaping was not smoking, it seemed safer than smoking cigarettes, but the long-term effects of vaping were unknown.
[00:13:11] Was it completely safe?
[00:13:13] Was it incredibly dangerous?
[00:13:15] Or was it somewhere in between?
[00:13:18] What was undeniable was that only a small proportion of the teenagers who vaped were aware of the fact that vaping contains nicotine.
[00:13:28] According to one report, 63% of teen Juul users said that they didn’t know the product contained nicotine.
[00:13:37] And it doesn’t just contain a little bit of nicotine, e-cigarettes, Juuls in particular, can have relatively high levels of nicotine.
[00:13:47] When you take into account how effective Juul is at delivering nicotine compared to cigarette smoking, one Juul pod has the same amount of nicotine as in a packet of cigarettes.
[00:14:01] And because of how easy it is to vape, to Juul, how you can do it inside, all the time, many young people were consuming very high levels of nicotine, sometimes the equivalent of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes every day.
[00:14:18] Soon enough, there were reports of teenagers being hospitalised with collapsed lungs after heavy use of vapes, which had often been modified or were using bootlegged, unofficial ingredients.
[00:14:31] Concerned parents wrote to schools and contacted local leaders, and in December 2018 vaping was declared an epidemic by the US Surgeon General.
[00:14:45] By this time, hundreds of other e-cigarette companies had popped up, but Juul was the clear market leader in the United States, with something like a 75% share of the market.
[00:14:58] Business was booming.
[00:15:01] In the same month that vaping was declared an epidemic, Juul also sold a 35% stake in the company to Altria, the company that owns cigarette brands such as Marlboro, for $12.5 billion.
[00:15:17] Overnight, Monsees and Bowen, the founders of Juul, were turned into billionaires, but this transaction caught the attention of the regulators.
[00:15:28] If Juul was an alternative to smoking, if they were the good guys, why did they sell to the bad guys?
[00:15:37] They used to bill themselves as anti-big tobacco, but now they were big tobacco.
[00:15:45] There was a series of investigations by the authorities, they were accused of marketing directly to children, huge fines were imposed on the company, and Juul was forced to make sweeping changes to the way it did business.
[00:15:59] Now, this episode is partly about Juul, because it was instrumental in the creation of the vaping industry, but we need to move on to talk about vaping and e-cigarettes more generally.
[00:16:13] How bad actually is it for your health?
[00:16:16] What sort of restrictions have governments placed on e-cigarettes and vaping, and how much should it be promoted, if at all, as an alternative to smoking?
[00:16:28] According to the British Public Health Service, e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than normal cigarettes, and the position of most national health services, including the World Health Organisation, is that using e-cigarettes is safer than traditional cigarettes.
[00:16:49] But, partially because of the negative press around vaping, talk of it becoming an epidemic and stories of addicted teenagers rushed to hospital with collapsed lungs, many smokers think it is more dangerous than it actually is.
[00:17:05] According to one survey from last year, 57% of cigarette smokers said that they thought vaping was equally or more harmful than smoking, while only 27% thought e-cigarettes were less harmful.
[00:17:22] In other words, smokers who might otherwise switch to vapes are not doing so because they believe that there are no health benefits from doing it.
[00:17:32] And it isn’t just individual smokers who are cautious about switching to e-cigarettes.
[00:17:37] In many countries, 34 at the last count, e-cigarettes are completely banned.
[00:17:45] Perhaps astonishingly, if you believe the view of the UK government that vaping is 95% less harmful than cigarette smoking, several of the countries that ban the sale of e-cigarettes have some of the world’s highest levels of cigarette smoking.
[00:18:01] In India, for example, 42% of adult men smoke, and smoking causes a million deaths a year.
[00:18:10] Turkey has practically the same prevalence of smoking, 42% of adult males, but e-cigarettes were banned in February 2020.
[00:18:20] Now, perfectly reasonably, these countries want to prevent young people from getting hooked on vapes, they fear that it could lead them to develop addictive tendencies, that it could lead them to start smoking cigarettes, and that there could also be unknown health consequences from e-cigarettes themselves.
[00:18:39] These are perfectly valid concerns.
[00:18:42] But vaping is a proven effective alternative to smoking, a way to get smokers to stop smoking cigarettes.
[00:18:50] It might not be completely safe, and the long-term effects are still not completely clear, but it is a whole lot less dangerous than smoking cigarettes, 20 times less dangerous if you believe the British Public Health Service.
[00:19:05] Ultimately, governments around the world want to reduce the percentage of their population that smokes, but there is a lack of consensus over the best way to do this.
[00:19:16] Is it by legalising and encouraging the use of e-cigarettes?
[00:19:20] Or is this a dangerous path that encourages teenagers to pick up an e-cigarette, which could lead to an addiction first to e-cigarettes, then cigarettes, and perhaps something more?
[00:19:32] The first Juul came out in 2015, almost 10 years ago now, and in 2024 there are an estimated almost 100 million people who use e-cigarettes.
[00:19:46] It is a lot, but it’s a fraction, less than 8%, of the 1.3 billion cigarette smokers around the world.
[00:19:56] To the greatest proponents of e-cigarettes, they have the potential to save literally hundreds of millions of lives and be one of the most effective public health tools of the 21st century.
[00:20:08] To their greatest critics, they threaten to hook a generation on nicotine products, and may well bring with them a plethora of unknown and unexpected health problems.
[00:20:20] Time will only tell which is right…
[00:20:24] OK then, that is it for today's episode on vaping, e-cigarettes, and Juul.
[00:20:30] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:20:33] Do you vape? If so, did you smoke cigarettes before, and how has vaping changed your cigarette consumption?
[00:20:40] What role do you think e-cigarettes should play, if any, in society?
[00:20:45] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:48] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:56] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:01] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
