Photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash

When I was 17-years-old, way back in 2008, I was wild and bright-eyed and would do just about anything for sex. I hung out with an even more rambunctious crowd, but prior to the year I turned 17, I hadn’t ever known anyone other than my parents that smoked cigarettes. I remember the day that changed. We were hanging around a Starbucks that was next to a GameStop, as teens do, talking and most likely planning a heist or something when a girl I’d never seen before stepped out of a car and came to join us.

Her name was Brittany and from the smell trailing from her and enveloping her like an old coat, I could tell she smoked cigarettes. I remember being appalled and disgusted by this, yet strangely attracted to her in some 17 and pheromones type of way. She was friends with one of the guys hanging in our group and he’d explained to me that he knew her from church and that I probably shouldn’t hit on her.

I started hitting on her. She ended up staying and talking to me long after my friends had hopped into their trucks and gone home and we spent many hours sitting on a curb in front of that Starbucks just talking about nothing and enjoying each other’s newfound company. Eventually, as I knew she would, she proffered a pack of cigarettes. Some kind of Camel pack that was black and had colorful lines on it. I think they were pink. Brittany began smoking one and after I watched her in pure fascination for awhile, she offered me one, asking if I’d ever smoked a cigarette before.

“Of course,” I said, wanting to be impressive in my false sense of masculinity. I took the cigarette and she lit it for me and I remember taking the smoke into my mouth and blowing it out rapidly, doing this over and over until the thing was burned out in about 2 minutes. She laughed at me and told me it was obvious I’d never smoked one before but that she’d light another for me and show me how.

I never ended up sleeping with Brittany, nor did I end up dating her, but I did end up with a crippling cigarette addiction that lasted ten years. I stopped smoking on December 6th, 2018, graduating to a very controversial device called a Juul that is also apparently a favorite among teens. Not to sound hyperbolic, but this device probably saved my life. When I was smoking cigarettes, I was often winded to the point of exhaustion from simple things such as walking up and down the stairs. I was coughing like someone perpetually infected with the common cold and I was waking up every morning congested and smelling like the cigarettes from the night before.

Switching from cigarettes to the Juul seemed like a natural progression, and I seem to have skipped all the side-effects of quitting smoking. I was still technically getting my nicotine but I was smoking way less than I had been when I was addicted to cigarettes. A few months later I bought another device that allowed me to use different flavors to vape on, flavors I pick for myself rather than the ones Juul picks for me at the behest of the government.

Fast forward half a year and there seems to be a very suspicious “vaping epidemic” going on. It seems as if every day there’s a deluge of new articles running rampant across the internet blaming “flavored e-cigarettes” for a series of deaths that were initially blamed on sketchy marijuana cartridges from China. We stopped talking about sketchy marijuana delivery systems and are now talking about flavored nicotine juice, as if banning a juice that tastes like butter cookies will make the tobacco flavors safer. It seems strange to me that flavors that don’t taste like cigarettes are potentially on the chopping block, especially when you take into account that the U.S. government made $12 billion in taxes from cigarettes in 1993. It almost feels as if we’re being herded right back in to smoking cigarettes.

According to the CDC, 33 people so far have died from vaping related illnesses. Do you know how many people die from cigarettes every year? That would be 480,000. That’s about 1,315 people a day, and we’re crying about 33 total. I’ve seen zero renewed interest in banning cigarettes, yet I’m being told from every corner of the internet that vaping is going to kill me tomorrow, led by a cavalry of states that allow me to purchase deadly weapons at Wal-Mart.

I realize it’s anecdotal and shouldn’t be taken as medical advice or even as a fact, as this is coming from some random writer on the internet, however; I’ve been cigarette-free for almost a year now and I’ve been using flavored juice for awhile. I have no chest pain or discomfort anymore, I’m able to go running without being winded, stairs are no longer an issue, I don’t wake up congested, and without flavored nicotine juices and the devices they flow through, I’d still be addicted to cigarettes.

Vaping is worth being studied. According to the CDC in a report published in 2018, cigarette smoking in people (aged ≥18 years old) declined from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 15.5 percent in 2016. The rise of vaping over the last few years isn’t a coincidence, and now several states in the U.S. are currently dancing on the precipice of banning flavored e-juices before long-form studies are even able be published. We’ve known for a very long time exactly what cigarettes do to people and no one is championing the cause of a cigarette ban, most likely because the taxation on them is so profitable at the federal and state level. I shouldn’t have to be the one to ask if we can please just study something before we bring down the banhammer, but this is where we’re at now.