"I believe vaping, like Uber, is a disruptive technology."

- Gregory Conley,

President of The American Vaping Association (AVA)

This observation by Gregory Conley is something that I've been attesting to over the years, and only now starting to fully realize just how disruptive of a technology it really is. For one, it's completely disrupted my lifestyle.

Over 8 years ago, when I was in college, I was introduced to the e-cigarette. Back then, it mimicked the look of a cigarette, you could only purchase it online, which was then shipped from the U.K., and it cost over $100 for a single stick that lasted you, at the most, a month.

Despite these limitations, however, I was already sold when I saw that tiny wisp of vapor come out of my friend's mouth when he took a drag off of it. As soon as I got home, I went on my computer and purchased an e-cig with pre-filled cartridges. Once it finally reached my house via snail mail (it took about two weeks), that was the day I quit smoking tobacco cigarettes entirely.

Over 8 years I've been clean from tobacco cigarettes and I haven't looked back since. That was the first time I was ever exposed to just how disruptive of a technology it was; it achieved what no other cessation option was able to give me: a viable way out of an almost-certain death sentence.

Indeed, John Britton, director of the UK Center for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Nottingham, once famously described e-cigarettes as "the first genuinely new way of helping people stop smoking that has come along in decades." (1)

Another form of disruption by that of vaping is the tobacco industry. In a 2014 study, published in the leading general medical journal BMJ, it was revealed that out of the 466 e-cigarette and e-liquid brands available, only 10 of them were actually owned by tobacco companies. (2)

And while tobacco companies have tried acquiring more vape brands since then, the gap between the number of non-tobacco vape brands and the number of tobacco-owned vape brands is larger than ever before. Like Kodak when digital photography began disrupting its industry, they tried to recover, but ultimately failed after realizing they were too late.

Today, while tobacco sales continue to decline quite dramatically, sales for vaping products have only begun to skyrocket. (3)

For now, the tobacco industry is merely holding onto threads, gasping for its final breath - largely because of the vaping industry. Vaping products partly work because they still provide nicotine, which is a tobacco-based substance that causes people to become addicted in the first place. But even that is about to change as the vaping industry is now starting to abandon Big Tobacco altogether by embracing a new technology of sorts: synthetic nicotine! (4)

Interesting enough, vaping itself is merely a byproduct of an exponentially-growing technology that's begun disrupting energy storage: Lithium-ion batteries.

Most of us are aware of the incredible strides Tesla Motors has gone to bring about their Powerwall, of which relies on lithium-ion battery packs. Similarly, most vaping rigs today rely on those same exact batteries as well. Since 2010, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen from $1000 per kWh to below $190 per kWh, according to Tesla. (5, 6)

Today, I'm able to purchase a single lithium-ion battery for around (+/-)$10. Seven years ago, however, in order to use the vaping rig that I have now, the batteries alone would've cost me over $100 (given that my rig uses two lithium-ion batteries).

Let me describe my rig: I use nothing but SMOK Technology Co. brands. My box mod is a SMOK G-Priv 220W Touch Screen. And my atomizer attached to it is a SMOK TFV12 Cloud Beast King Tank. It cost me around $100+ in total.

Remember when I mentioned that my first ever e-cigarette cost me over $100? And at its best, it usually only lasted for a month before I had to buy a new one? The rig that I have now cost around the same price, and yet it produces vapor 100x more than my first ever e-cig and is still going strong after purchasing it back in April (6 months ago)!

From both a lifestyle- and industry-based perspective, vaping is, indeed, a disruptive technology. But what about from a health-based perspective?

Over the years, there's been a lot of fear-mongering being perpetuated by Big Tobacco lobbyists, of which their propaganda has swiftly spread across the Internet thanks to pseudo-science bloggers and "journalists." The two main myths being perpetuated: That vaping products were producing high levels of both formaldehyde and diacetyl.

In terms of formaldehyde, a controversial letter was published in 2015 by The New England Journal of Medicine, whereby it claimed that people who vaped were at risk of getting cancer "15 times as high...as the risk associated with long-term smoking [of tobacco cigarettes]." (7)

The letter was so controversial that more than 40 researchers and experts backed a plea to have it retracted, highlighting major flaws in both its methodology and conclusion. (8)

A year later, in a new study published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, researchers further debunked the letter by showing that most vape products emitted significantly lower levels of formaldehyde than previously claimed (much lower than tobacco cigarettes). (9)

In terms of diacetyl, the myth here is that vaping leads to an incurable condition known as "popcorn lungs." Needless to say, like the myth of formaldehyde, the myth of high levels of diacetyl originate from an incredibly flawed, and long-since debunked, study. Rather than boring you any more than I have already, if you wish to learn more about this, Snopes.com did an excellent take-down of the "popcorn lungs" myth, of which will be cited below. (10)

The fact of the matter is that, despite all of the heavy funding by Big Tobacco companies to destroy the vaping industry and pseudo-scientific jargon being perpetuated across the Internet, the science is already in: Vaping is significantly healthier than smoking tobacco cigarettes.

In a 2015 report published by Public Health England, of which is an executive agency of the Department of Health in the United Kingdom, they concluded that "e-cigarette use is around 95% less harmful to health than smoking." (11) This conclusion was only further solidified in a landmark meta-analysis study that was published this year. (12)

In other words, just as it was disruptive in both peoples' lifestyles and of the tobacco industry as a whole, we can now officially conclude that it's been equally disruptive in our overall longevity.

And, yes, if you have to ask, I was happily vaping while writing this down.

Sources cited:

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/health/e-cigarettes-vaping-quitting-smoking-royal-college-of-physicians.html

2. http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/23/suppl_3/iii3.full

3. https://www.cstoredecisions.com/2017/01/11/cigarette-sales-decline-smokeless-sales-grow/

4. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/vaping-industry-wants-go-post-tobacco-synthetic-nicotine/

5. https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/electric-vehicle-battery-cost-dropped-80-6-years-227kwh-tesla-190kwh/

6. https://electrek.co/2016/04/26/tesla-model-3-battery-pack-cost-kwh/

7. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1413069

8. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.13018/full

9. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230015301549

10. https://www.snopes.com/vaping-causes-popcorn-lung/

11. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/454517/Ecigarettes_a_firm_foundation_for_evidence_based_policy_and_practice.pdf

12. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/behindtheheadlines/news/2017-02-07-long-term-vaping-far-safer-than-smoking-says-landmark-study/