Oliver Kershaw

It’s with great sadness that I learned Njoy filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday after two years of diminishing sales.

I came to know many of those involved with Njoy over the years. There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that this is a team motivated to the core to fulfil their founder’s mission: to create a world free of smoking.

And, let it be known, all vapers owe a HUGE debt to Njoy, or Sottera as the company is called. It was Sottera that forced back the FDA from impounding vaping products as unauthorised medicines, winning their case in 2010 and ultimately setting the stage for the industry that followed and flourishes today, despite the continued threat of regulatory oblivion.

Their Njoy king was revolutionary when it was release three years ago, selling $93 million through 2013. However, for numerous reasons the success didn’t persist and the tobacco industry, doubling down on their offerings, took over the market with their distribution strength and

1. Smoking is everywhere

Run out of your favourite smokes? Chances are a re-up is only 5 minutes away. Heck, even pharmacies sell cigarettes - you try picking up your favourite vape from Walgreens. I’m right, aren’t I? It’s an easy life being a smoker. Until it kills you.

2. Smoking is easy

What’s to know? You put it in your mouth, set fire to it, take 12 puffs and you’re done. Vaping, not so much. let’s face it, there’s a learning curve to most vape that simply doesn’t exist with smoking. And do you know when to change a coil? Do you know when you’re done vaping? Isn’t having yet another thing to charge irritating? Smoking is really easy.

3.  Smoking is cool

You might think you look awesome vaping. Hey, maybe you do! But the reality is that vaping is not now and will never reach the glamorous heights that smoking once did. From the 40s to the 80s everyone smoked - movie

At vaping.com we’re focussed on ensuring that you find your perfect vape in the shortest time possible. Choosing between a Mouth to Lung and Direct to Lung puff style will determine what kind of hardware and liquid you use.

This choice will shape your overall vaping experience so it's the most important thing to know when starting out

There's no right or wrong here, it's just preference. So let's have a look at what each entails:

Mouth to Lung

Mouth-to-lung (MtL) is essentially the same as how most people drag on a cigarette. You suck the vape into your mouth and then inhale into your throat or lungs.

People that MtL aren’t focussed on generating huge clouds of vapour. Instead, flavour and nicotine are key to delivering the satisfaction they crave. MtL vapers usually have a setup which outputs at under  15 Watts.

The all time best selling refillable mouth to lung tank is the Aspire Nautilus,

Eric Lindblom, senior scholar at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, and former Senior Advisor to the FDA’s Centre for Tobacco Products has published a lengthy report in the Food and Drug Law Journal entitled “Effectively Regulating E-Cigarettes and Their Advertising - and the First Amendment” (pdf download). This is an important document which gives great insight into the legal thought that will inform FDA’s actions going forward. 

Fundamentally, Lindblom supposes that the scientific questions as to safety, gateways, dual use, cessation efficacy and so forth do not need be resolved prior to the issuance of the regulation, since the law will allow the FDA to resolve these questions at its leisure once it is in place.

At the very core of Mr Lindblom’s argument is the following logic chain:

As a result of the tobacco act and the deeming

In February 2012 a Florida man, Tom Holloway, suffered extensive injuries after his vape device exploded, gaining the unfortunate distinction of being the first person to be injured by vape mod. By today’s standards, this device was primitive: it was a closed tube with a button on the side and a screw thread on the top to connect the atomizing unit. Variations on this same technology still in wide use, known as “mech mods” because they close the electrical circuit in a purely mechanical fashion.

This injury didn’t come as a surprise to many in the then small but fast-growing vape community. Indeed, E-Cigarette-Forum had tried to create a standard which would mitigate the fallout of so-called “thermal failures”; simple things like ensuring vents could allow explosive gasses to escape and be directed

On Monday this week the MHRA (the UK medicines body that has responsibility for regulating e-cigarettes) issued its draft guidance on eliquids. Amongst other stipulations, it listed the ingredients that manufacturers may not use in eliquid:

So, it's official: companies will not be able to notify e-liquids which contain DA/AP, and these liquids will have to come off the UK market by May 20th next year.

I'm reliably informed that this is unlikely to affect many vape juice currently manufactured in the UK, but US liquids have become something of a phenomenon

The much-vaunted Cole-Bishop Amendment was voted down on Sunday. The Cole Bishop amendment would have grandfathered all vaping products that were on the market on 8/8 last year, and exempted them from PMTAs.

As things stand, then, we’re back on the FDA’s regulatory countdown; although the countdown was (perhaps not coincidentally) pushed back by 3 months on Monday.

This is not to say, however, that things are the same as they were six months ago. A few things have become clear to me over the last couple of weeks through conversations with people deeply involved in the regulatory process. These elements will shape the contours of how this all plays out over the long-term.

1. FDA understands vaping better now

FDA has

An essay by Oliver Kershaw & Amelia Howard

There is a disconnect between the tobacco research community and the vape community. Both groups have almost totally divergent knowledge-base of the technology; the former based on its existing tobacco research agenda, the latter based on practical experience with the technology and through peer-learning and marketing.

We contend that vape is not an extension of the medical science paradigm or the tobacco control paradigm and, therefore, that the techniques used to (simultaneously) understand and tackle tobacco usage are wholly inappropriate in understanding vape. We are not saying that these established paradigms are illegitimate or irrelevant. But they do not work well when it comes to understanding user-driven technology, which, importantly, is also not an extension of the tobacco industry.

This has led to a continued and intractable divergence between the practice community

Please contact your representative and senators today:  “Cole-Bishop” needs a push.

If you’re new to vaping, or even a relatively experienced vaper you might be unaware of just how many times vape has nearly been prohibited over the last 10 years, both in the US and internationally.

Vape survives today only because of the actions of thousands of people like you who step up when asked. Today is one of those days and CASAA has issued a call to action:

Call and urge your Senators and Representative to support Cole-Bishop's inclusion in the 2017 budget!

It's incredibly easy to find the contact details for your representative and senators:

For your representative, go here and enter your zip

For your senators, go here and choose your state

Talking points:

•Urge them to support the Cole-Bishop language in the 2017 US budget bill

•If

Iowa's Attorney General, Tom Miller, issued the strongest public challenge yet to Mitch Zeller, head of the FDA's Centre for Tobacco Products, to intervene in the way vaping products are regulated. Speaking at the Food and Drug Law Institute's Tobacco conference luncheon on October 27th, he urged Mitch Zeller to "come to the rescue and use his authority to the fullest extent to not overregulate e-cigarettes and the implementation of the rule."

Tom Miller has served nine consecutive terms as Iowa's AG, was the president of the NAAG, and has a deep and long-standing involvement in US Tobacco Control efforts. AG Miller was instrumental in the Master

You’ll probably be aware that there have been a number of recent injuries associated with vaping reported in the media.

Naturally, we’ve been following this story closely and we want to reassure our customers that these injuries are completely unrelated to the products we sell. 

All products on vaping.com are standard nicotine-containing vapour products and, since their availability in 2004, they have not been associated with any known outbreak of injuries.

We are prevented from making specific claims about the safety of our products by FDA regulations, but we do believe we are legally entitled to reassure you that these injuries have been caused by THC products and not nicotine products.

What do we know?

As multiple outlets

Last Friday, the Detroit Wayne Mental Health Authority announced on Facebook a new billboard they had erected that claims vaping is equally dangerous as smoking. The posting was met with fury by vapers, and has caused long-term damage to the DWMHA’s organisational reputation.

The billboard features a close-up image of a man vaping, and features the text: “E-qually dangerous” as well as a freephone telephone helpline number and the DWMHA logo. It’s unclear at present where the billboard is located.

Greg Conley of the AVA shared the posting , commenting: “Even the prohibitionist groups you obviously adore like the Cancer Society and Lung Association will generally admit that vaping is significantly less hazardous than smoking. Shame on you.”

Within hours, DWMHA’s Facebook was inundated with comments and “1-star” business reviews. At the time of writing DWHMA

A study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that e-cigarettes are almost twice as effective as NRT in helping smokers remain abstinent from cigarettes.

The study team, from Queen Mary University of London, saw that 18% of participants who were given vaping products and a four-week behavioural course remained smoke-free after a year, compared with 10% of those given medical nicotine such as patches or gum. Participants were given a vaping starter-kit and advised to make their own future purchasing decisions.

Previous e-cigarette studies using the “gold standard” randomised-controlled methodology were conducted years ago and based on a single (and no longer available) model of e-cigarette, which was poor at delivering nicotine. Even still, those studies showed a modest level of efficacy, approximately equal to that of patches and gums. The lack of a clear advantage,

The inaugural US E-Cigarette Summit took place in Washington DC on Monday.

Encouragingly, there does now finally appear to be a consensus amongst the tobacco control community: Smokers should be encouraged to use vaping products if they’ve been unable to quit using FDA approved stuff. To many in the vaping industry, this will appear to be missing the wood for the trees, but that’s just the nature of consensus. It’s a net positive, and could not have occurred even a year ago.

But the vaping industry remains unrepresented in this discourse. Delegates at yesterday's Summit did not come away from the event with anything like an incremental understanding of the true nature and character of vaping. It just wasn’t in the room. The only industry present, either physically, or in the mind of the non-industry delegates, were the few larger players that are going through the PMTA motions.

Don’t misunderstand me – it's great that companies