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SMOKE & MIRRORS? WORDS — JAMIE CHRISTIAN DESPLACES
I used to smoke like my life depended on it. For more than 15 years, smoking was absolutely one of my most favourite things (probably the most), to be enjoyed not just with a whiskey or a coffee or after a meal, but at half-time of Sunday soccer or following a good walk or a jog. I was in my early thirties before I really gave any serious consideration to quitting which I did partly through the self-help book, Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr, and partly through swapping my nicotine addiction for that of long-distance running—through which I wound up with a broken hip! Quitting cigarettes is among the most difficult endeavours that an average Joe will ever undertake, and succeeding is something to be supremely proud of. Non-smokers might, quite understandably, scoff at such hyperbole, but numerous studies have compared nicotine addiction with that of heroin. For some years now, vaping—the ‘smoking’ of e-cigarettes— has been touted as the best way to beat the cigs, but a rising concern is that many non-smokers—especially teens—are taking to vaping, with e-cigarettes themselves then proving difficult to kick. The Making of Vaping In 1963, the year before the USA’s surgeon general released the historic Smoking and Health report that linked smoking and lung cancer, a Pennsylvanian scrap metal dealer by the
name of Herbert A Gilbert invented the world’s first electronic cigarette. Named ‘Smokeless’, it worked through the heating of a liquid that created a vapour to be inhaled. Available in flavours such as mint, rum or cinnamon, it was billed by Gilbert as allowing users to “smoke their favourite food”, but no firm was interested in mass-manufacturing it. Today, the vaping industry is worth a cool $15 billion globally, but Gilbert’s patent has long since expired and he hasn’t made a dime. “The only substantial thing I received was the satisfaction of saving millions of lives,” the magnanimous 87-year-old told Smithsonian Magazine last December. Vaping’s Aping E-cigarettes come in all shapes and sizes: some replicate cigars, some arrive in replica traditional cigarette boxes that store the flavour cartridges, while others boast a disposable design like a regular cigarette. You can even smoke a ‘hookah pen’. Rather than inhale the noxious gases of burning tobacco, e-cigarettes allow users to ‘smoke’ a vaporised liquid that forms a mist. Today’s designs, though more technically advanced than Gilbert’s, riff heavily on his invention that relied on users to draw a breath through the cartridge, moistened with a flavouring agent, that then allowed flavoured air to pass though a heating element and into their mouth.
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