I am staring at myself in the mirror, taking my very first
drag of a cigarette ever. I look like a man who fought every man I ever thought
about fighting, slept with every woman I ever thought about sleeping with, got
a free song from every jukebox I thought about punching. There is smoke
dragoning out of my mouth, a flame at the end of my cig—or, more accurately,
vapor that’s designed to look like smoke, a red LED light that’s designed to
look like a flame, a long metal tube with a cell phone-style battery inside
that’s designed to look like a cigarette. I am cooler than a guy smoking a
cigarette. I am a guy smoking a gadget. And until my wife shows me how to
actually inhale my electronic cigarette into my lungs, which causes me to cough
and tear, I look very, very cool.
Other people nearly as cool as me are smoking e-cigs too:
Britney Spears, Jeremy Piven, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Moss, Paris Hilton, and
Catherine Zeta-Jones. Katherine Heigl puffed on one while watching The Book of
Mormon on Broadway. Charlie Sheen plans to start his own brand of e-cigs, the
NicoSheen. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
the number of Americans who have smoked an e-cig more than quadrupled, from 0.6
percent of the population in 2009 to 2.7 percent in 2010. That’s more than 8
million people.
There are now hundreds of companies selling e-cigs—although
they’re buying parts from just four factories in China, where the technology
was first patented by pharmacist Hon Lik in 2003. He formed the company Ruyan
(which means “like smoke”) and started selling e-cigs in China the following
year before getting an international patent in 2007. Since then the technology
has gotten even better and the marketing more sophisticated. Some e-cigs,
marketed toward women, are thinner and come in leather cases with a mirror.
Some have social networking capabilities that help you find other e-cig
smokers. And some come in such flavors as peppermint, Swedish fish, and bacon.
“I can remember a year ago at a restaurant having an
electronic cigarette after a meal, and having a waitress say, ‘You can’t smoke
here,’ and me having to explain it to her. Now the more common situation is you
walk into a restaurant or a bar and smoke an electronic cigarette, and the
bartender says, ‘Oh, you’re fine.’ They know,” says Jay Meistrell, co-owner of
V2 Cigs . His e-cigs were sold at the Wired Store, a holiday pop-up store in
New York that displays new gadgets the tech magazine considers cool. V2 Cigs
says its gross revenue grew 20 percent each month last year, including one day
when it sold more than $300,000 worth of products. This month, Jeffrey Hill, a
former Procter & Gamble (PG) executive, sunk $7 million of his own money
into Spire Electronic Cigarette, an e-cig company whose products are sold in
New York bars and clubs such as Webster Hall and promoted by “brand
ambassadors,” some of whom are Iraq veterans. Hill hopes to market his brand to
the military.
Because e-cigs don’t create secondhand smoke, you can smoke
them anywhere. “They’ve taken off because the restrictions on regular
cigarettes have gotten a little ridiculous. It’s not the land of the free. It’s
more like the land of the oppressed,” says Ray Story, an e-cig company owner
who is also chief executive officer of the e-cig trade organization, the
Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Assn. “Electronic cigarettes are like the
Sony Walkman. People used to walk around with these huge boom boxes, and everybody was subjected to the crap they were
listening to. Then they came up with a way that you can enjoy the music, but no
one has to hear your crap,” he says.
Few people had tried an e-cig until last year, partly
because the technology was new and unrefined. “Until December 2010, the ones
that looked like a cigarette were what I call ‘weenie vaping.’ They only lasted
30 minutes and the liquids tasted like dirty socks or hamster cages,” says Jan
Snyder, a retired computer hardware designer in Austin, Tex., whose YouTube
(GOOG) videos reviewing e-cig products often get several thousand hits.
The Food and Drug Administration gave e-cigs an even bigger
boost when it tried to ban the product until clinical trials were completed,
claiming it was a drug-delivery product for people trying to quit cigarettes.
But Story sued the agency, and last year the U.S. Court of Appeals in
Washington, D.C., declared e-cigs should be sold like cigarettes, only sellers
don’t need a tobacco license. So now they’re for sale at Walgreens (WAG),
convenience stores, and bars, as well as online.
Article Credit: http://www.businessweek.com
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