Transcript

It's so wild to me.

Sometimes I don't even know what's happening.

I look around and there's 50 people in here

and they're all talking about Oh what are you vaping on?

What flavor is that? There's hints of oak in there.

It's like there's a whole connoisseurship to it now,

which is so awesome and exactly what I was hoping for.

(e-cigarettes lighting)

One, two, three, four, five.

♫ Well it was in my childhood days

♫ Oh Lord too many, many long years ago

Like people with wine, for instance,

they'll go on and on about where do the grapes come from,

what barrels was it aged in, how long was it aging for?

You'll find people in vaping who go

about it the exact same way.

It's a matter of what you want to get out of it.

It's like with any other hobby.

They sit here at the bar and talk about it for hours,

and there's all new, we just got this new flavor in called

Mother's Milk by Suicide Bunny

and it sold out in two hours, we sold like 60 bottles of it.

There's everything from creamy blueberry lemon

to banana cinnamon nut bread, to pomegranate strawberry,

to Jamaican rum brown sugar and of course,

for those who are just transitioning from cigarettes

they like mint and tobacco flavors more,

but it's very interesting because after two or three weeks

they want something more exotic.

Our goal is to help people get off cigarettes

but we're building a business while we do that.

Nicotine is a chemical that is

produced by the tobacco plant.

People have discovered that when you smoke the leaves of the

tobacco plant you get that chemical in your bloodstream.

And nicotine by itself is not an awful drug.

As drugs go, it's not all that bad.

It's the tar in the cigarettes that does so much damage.

By the end of the century smoking will have killed

more than a billion people worldwide.

Mark Twain wrote, It's easy to quit smoking.

I've done it hundreds of times.

And that's absolutely true.

We don't have a lot of new things to work with,

there haven't been any new medications for smoking

in more than 10 or 12 years.

Why not e-cigarettes?

It's got the look, the feel, it has the nicotine.

But the other 4,999 chemicals in cigarette smoke,

most of which we don't even know,

are not present.

Maybe we can somehow incorporate this

into a smoking cessation intervention that works.

It stands to reason that these are probably,

puff for puff, less dangerous than regular cigarettes.

That's not the same as saying that they are safe.

So if they get kids hooked on nicotine,

that's a really bad thing.

If they get a smoker who would have quit smoking

to continue smoking, that's a bad thing.

If they get a smoker who stopped smoking to go back

to nicotine addiction and then smoking, that's a bad thing.

And if they re-glamorize the act of smoking,

that's a bad thing.

Some manufacturers have developed a new device

to deliver a drug to people, and that drug is nicotine.

They're out there selling it unregulated.

We don't know how healthy or unhealthy these are

over the long term, but the question is this:

Five, 10 years from now, if we were to find out

that these are really really bad for your health,

and it's a multi-billion dollar industry

and there are e-cigarette lobbyists crawling all over

City Hall and State Legislature and Washington,

do you think that we could take public action

against them then?

There are really two kind of competing principles here,

one is the precautionary principle: If in doubt, don't.

So you have to be 100% certain that something's safe

before you introduce it into the marketplace.

And then harm-reduction takes this other stance.

It recognizes that drug use is going to continue,

and that cessation doesn't necessarily have to be your goal.

But if you were to get somebody to switch

from tobacco cigarettes to be a lifelong e-cigarette user

they would be far better off.

Before it was very difficult even to get people to try it.

It's a fake cigarette, a lot of people were saying then,

and now people just come in and we give them

the rechargeable, bigger battery option because they've

seen their friends using it.

So this is what really everyone starts on.

It's what you call a Cigalike style, so it basically looks

and feels like a cigarette.

From there, people usually move up

to your basic Ego Kit or e-juice.

Like a 24 milligram is a high level of nicotine

that will do the trick for them,

but then we can reduce their nicotine levels over time

and then we have a no-nicotine option

if they choose to, it's their choice obviously,

because what you put into your body should be your choice.

And of course there's a responsibility that we have,

as business owners, to provide the best quality e-liquids.

[Nick] So let's see why people go

down in nicotine level and they upgrade

to something which you call a Mod.

This one right here is more for the hobbyist.

There's not circuitry in here, so it basically gets

all its power straight from the battery.

[Talia] They rewire their own atomizers

for different effects.

[Nick] The way you wanna do it is that you have a

coil right over here and over here,

as well as you wick it yourself.

So you just drip a couple drops like that.

So if I fire like this...

A regular e-cig set-up taste is alright,

but you get more heat to your coils,

it tastes better, you get more flavor.

It's nice, it tastes like fresh pizza as opposed

to pulling it out of the fridge.

They're vapers, and they evaporate their nicotine,

and they go to a Vaporium where they can vape.

If you look up the hashtag cloudchasing on Instagram

it's just a bunch of people with huge clouds

Oh yeah they're literally vomiting.

It's cool, it's flashy.

But I like to blow decently big clouds.

I also like to taste my juice.

But to each their own, right?

Have all the fun you want, just be safe.

Unless of course you like to live dangerously,

then I can't help you there.

We don't know what's actually put in e-cigarettes,

we don't have a standard for how they're manufactured,

or how they're produced.

And since there's no federal oversight right now,

we're really concerned about it and we felt like

until we know more more we should at least be

preventative and proactive.

Late last year the New York City Council

passed a policy that would expand the Smoke Free Air Act

to include e-cigarettes.

So therefore, wherever you can't smoke

a traditional cigarette you now will

not be able to smoke or use an e-cigarette.

The problem with that position is that

e-cigarettes are not cigarettes.

So the idea of treating e-cigarettes as cigarettes,

that's a false premise.

So now basically vapers needs to go

where smokers go to get their nicotine.

Whatever happens in New York usually

ripples across the country.

Except, of course, for vape shops.

It was written in the bill that we're allowed

to sell and use electronic cigarettes here.

And most people are like, Talia

that's amazing for your business.

That's going to drive more business to you.

But for me it's more about public perception.

[Bruce] I wasn't around in the 20s but I've seen films.

and read, and it reminded like it was a speakeasy,

that people were engaged in activity

that they thought was cool, that they thought was okay,

that was beneficial for them,

but that the powers be and the government

were saying no, no, no.

This is like a piece of resistance in a way.

You're resisting Big Tobacco corporations right now.

This is a Nintendo mod.

This guy in his basement basically rewired it

to make it an e-cig.

It took four months on a waiting list to get for the shop.

That's what makes this industry cool.

It was started by individuals who quit smoking

and wanted to get it out to the world.

Now that's changing a bit

and Big Tobacco's getting involved.

I mean it's been quite interesting because when we

started the company I spoke to some Big Tobacco execs

and they were basically making fun of electronic cigarettes

and they thought it was a fad and it was going to pass,

and I just kept saying This is the future of smoking.

For Big Tobacco, buying e-cigarette companies is

like hedge fund right?

Even though in the beginning they were

terribly frightened of e-cigarettes,

now they're saying we have lots of money anyway

let's buy some of these companies either to shut them down

or to try to make money by selling this product

so that we don't get caught out

with fields of tobacco that we can't sell.

C'mon guys. Rise from the ashes.

Blu was owned by the guy named Jason Healy,

who started the business four years ago.

So he found this great product, an electronic cigarette

and started creating affiliate banners on porn websites.

It was the perfect demographic: 18-40-year-old males.

Hi. I'm Jason Healy from Blu,

and I'm proud to announce the launch

of our Blu Premium Smart Pack.

And then about a year and a half ago he sold it

to Lorillard who owns Newport, Big Tobacco.

[Kenneth] E-cigarettes are definitely a global story.

I'm estimating it's around a three and 1/2

to four billion dollar industry today.

The US accounts for about half of that business,

but virtually all of the large tobacco manufacturers,

including Philip Morris International,

are looking to e-cigarettes as basically

the growth platform of the future.

It just exploded and it's the wild west out there.

These cigarette manufacturers do

whatever they want to do. They sell them in bodegas.

In most of the United States they can sell them

to anyone at any age.

As long as there's a minor ban in place,

which there is now in New York,

we can't help if kids are going to start using these.

We can help in our store.

We card everybody that looks under 30.

They can advertise them on television.

[TV Announcer] Friends don't let friends smoke.

Give 'em the only electronic cigarette worth switching to.

The NJOY King. Cigarettes, you've met your match.

All sorts of things that you can't do with cigarettes.

♫ C-A-M-E-L Oooooh

I still remember the jingles from my youth

of the tobacco companies, Frighteningly enough.

Cigarettes remain attractive to most people,

at a deep subconscious level. Why?

Because of movies, film, television.

How about a good night's cigarette, Ricky?

Thanks Lucy. (moans) Nothin' but the best, right?

Nothin' but Philip Morris.

And so much of the fight around smoking has been

the fight around the images of smoking

because those images are so powerful in how people behave.

E-cigarette manufacturers say that these are something

which is going to be used to help smokers quit

but that's not the way they're marketing them.

[Reporter] The FDA warns consumers have no way

of knowing whether they're safe.

The marketing is way out ahead of where the science is.

The put them in flavors like strawberry and pina colada.

They have sexy actresses that are using them on television

during the Golden Globes.

And then NJOY paid hunky young men,

naked except for some red gym shorts,

to pass out free samples of these.

That's not how you market e-cigarettes

to smokers to help them quit.

That's how you market to teenage girls.

Clearly there has to be some scrutiny of this.

Big Tobacco has avoided scrutiny. That's a concern.

I don't trust them at all. Nobody trusts them.

Nobody should trust them.

Their profit motive is their only motive.

Think about this, do you really believe RJ Reynolds

and Philip Morris and Lorillard want to help smokers quit?

Whatever side of the e-cigarette debate people are on

there is agreement that there needs

to be some form of regulation.

But even though there are things we don't know,

what we do know is that smoking kills half

of all of its long-term users. Tobacco smoking.

So it becomes a question of weighing this

against what the known risks are.

I think the known risks far overshadow the unknown risks,

at this point.

There are arguments that have been made

over a hundred years,

well we should go ahead and plunge in and start

using this new product that's gonna save

an awful lot of lives.

We don't need to do the studies.

We don't have time to do the studies.

And that's always a mistake.

Let's remember that no one knows at this point what the

health effects are of sucking this stuff into your lungs

every day for hours a day for 20 years.

But a world full of people vaping is not the same

as a world full of people smoking.

We're just at the beginning of testing.

And I think the next five years of medical research,

because things move very quickly today,

will allow us to answer those questions.

And once we answer those questions we'll know,

Is this harmful? Is this as harmful as smoking tobacco?

It's like I had a handle on it a year ago

because it was pretty unheard of then

and there wasn't this culture.

And now this culture is popped up and I just step back

and I'm watching it all unfold around me.

You know, I put effort forth, and my intention is good

and I really want to help people

but I don't know where this is going to be

five years from now.

I do know that I'll be highly involved

and probably entrenched in it,

but I don't have control of where it's going to go.