
Why is Juul worth $16B? It’s more like a cigarette than you think - nwrk
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17529442/juul-vapes-nicotine-electronic-cigarettes-addiction-funding
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jeffdavis
Cigarettes have all the right metrics for a startup: great user engagement,
network effects, negligible per-user costs, sticky and hard to leave.

The big invention here is a one-liner: s/smoking/vaping/g.

~~~
8bitsrule
Very much like social media, porn, automobiles and sex.

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danpalmer
It’s interesting how the messaging has shifted over the past ~4 years from
vaping being a way to quit nicotine addiction, to vaping being a way to stop
smoking cigarettes. I’ve often heard the former from people, but the latter
from companies.

With the low nicotine liquids coming out, I bet they are low enough that you
can’t smoothly transition from higher nicotine content to lower nicotine
content. I’m sure they won’t sell a smooth gradient of nicotine levels that
help people quit, instead it will just be marketed as “diet vaping” and will
be a huge marketing effort that will pain then in a much more positive light
without any real loss of lock-in.

~~~
creep
>With the low nicotine liquids coming out, I bet they are low enough that you
can’t smoothly transition from higher nicotine content to lower nicotine
content.

There's a funny little "vape van" in back of a strip mall where I live. They
make their own vape juice (with a permit, of course) in-house right in front
of you. They measure the nicotine themselves, so theoretically I could get as
much or as little nicotine as I wanted in 240 mLs at $80. They also label the
bottles if there are any controversial flavorings.

There are more than a handful of vape shops in my city like this, who can mix
their own and who care about what happens with their customers. It's actually
like a little community sometimes.

I think as long as the gourmet vape juice business survives, there won't be
the problems you talk about. Kids want the Juul convenience, but adults trying
to quit smoking usually want to do it the best way-- ie. not with salted
nicotine, or disposable juice pods, etc. It's kind of like coffee or chocolate
in that way, where it's easy and fun to become sort of a connoisseur and buy
all the best and interesting flavors and smoke them in the perfect vape.

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newfocogi
Does Juul do any advertising? One of the biggest problems I see in the
historical tobacco industry was how subversive the advertising was. I wonder
if Juul goes down a similar path.

~~~
marpstar
They are HUGE with the Instagram influencers, and therefore the younger
audiences.

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Lazare
Something to keep in mind is that the tobacco industry has a ton of money, a
demonstrated willingness to play dirty if needed, and a deeply vested interest
in undermining companies like Juul.

I'm not saying that the The Verge or Rachel Becker have any intention of
defending the tobacco industry from disruptive startups, not am I suggesting
that vaping in general or Juul in specific aren't be problematic.

What I _am_ saying is that there's an immense amount of money and effort is
being deployed to ensure that people will defend the tobacco industry and will
attack vaping, and it's always worth being extra cautious. "Where there's
smoke, there's fire" is rarely a useful heuristic, but it's extra useless when
you know there's a guy with a smoke machine around the corner. :)

~~~
UnderProtest
To some extent for Big Tobacco this might be like BP hedging on solar power.
Nicotine is still best extracted from the tobacco plant. I doubt they'll fight
vaping forever.

What I see is people foolishly fighting the last war. Today's adults have been
trained since early life on the evils of smoking and nicotine addiction and
vice. We have this narrative of Big Tobacco pushing a product they claimed was
safe and which was not. There are all these programmed mental circuits saying
"if you don't like smoking, you should be suspicious of vaping."

And so at the beginning of vaping there was a lot of FUD about popcorn lung.
Now there's FUD about kids getting hooked on Juul. Everybody's looking for the
catch because last time there was a catch.

A future in which 20% of the population is forever hooked on vaping nicotine
and no cigarettes are sold is a utopia compared to what we have now. Instead
of embracing that future we have the anti-tobacco activists spreading alarm
about vaping and all the old smoking laws being expanded to cover an activity
that doesn't justify the ostracism.

I've never smoked or vaped and the laws have no effect on me. For a brief
period I saw smokers switching when they could vape indoors. That advantage is
disappearing.

We're missing a chance to _kill cigarettes_ in the developed world. We should
embrace the viral appeal of the vape fad before they become just another
nicotine delivery device. We could save millions of lives.

~~~
Lazare
I agree very strongly. Vaping is a bit of an unknown, but it's difficult to
overstate how terrible tobacco is.

Like you, I've never smoked or vaped, but I see vaping as an excellent chance
to actually kill off tobacco. If we later learn some flavouring agent is
harmful, well, we have an entire regulatory apparatus that let's us solve
these things.

> We could save millions of lives.

Yep. Or we could virtue signal about how important self restraint and puritan
morals are. Might kill a bunch of people, but man, think how great that smug
feeling will feel!

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dizzystar
Spourious claims about the chemical makeup of vapor? Check.

Misinformed statements about what science found about the dangers of vaping vs
cigarettes? Check.

Citations of studies with no peer review, that likely don't say what the
article claims? Check.

Wrong information about the mechanics of vaping? Check.

Boogyman chemistry? Check.

No indicative knowledge about how people actually use these devices? Check.

What about the children-isms? Double check.

Look, I get it. As someone who vapes, I truly do my best to treat it like
smoking, which is saying I do my darndest to respect those around me.

I don't know what to think of Juul. I was told it has 50 mil nic and my jaw
hit the floor. Those that vape knows that's a crazy number, and obviously
these are incredibly low powered devices.

People do move from Juul to more advanced setups, and yes, they step all the
way down to 12 or 6 mil (nicotine) off the bat and likely go down to 3 mil
after a few months.

~~~
handsomechad
Why do you go down mil(lileter?) nicotine as you progress? pardon my ignorance
i have only vaped a few times.

Why did your jaw hit the floor for JUUL?

~~~
pandaman
Most vaping devices (mods) produce much denser vapor and doing 50 mg/ml
nicotine with them would not be pleasant even for an experienced smoker.
People who use vaping to quit smoking gradually decrease nicotine
concentration to wean themselves off nicotine.

~~~
LyndsySimon
It wouldn’t even be safe, much less pleasant.

In my experience, 50mg/ml in a low power device like a July is about equal to
9mg/ml in a sub-ohm device.

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akeck
It’s essentially a drug delivery device. I don’t understand how it’s not
regulated by FDA.

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bra-ket
The great thing about Juul is the lack of chemical aftertaste

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mchahn
I'm not sure why it is called vaping. You can see smoke come out. It uses a
heater to burn the juice.

~~~
jasongill
It's called vaping because the carrier liquid (propylene glycol) is being
vaporized. There isn't supposed to be any smoke - if so, something is wrong.

~~~
colanderman
I think the GP is confusing smoke with vapor.

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mchahn
To be honest I've only seen pot vapes. And I do see smoke, not vapor.

~~~
ryanlol
Pot vapes definitely aren't supposed to put out smoke. With some vapes you
could achieve this by cranking the heat all the way up, but it'd be a far
worse experience than just smoking.

I guess some of the cheap $20 chinese ones like the "gpen" might not actually
vaporize though.

~~~
mchahn
I see a white cloud. Could that be vapor? I always thought vapors were
invisible.

~~~
ryanlol
Yeah, that is vapor. Vapors aren't necessarily invisible, you can see the
clouds in the sky too.

Might look similar, but it's a completely different experience for the user.

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hymen0ptera
It feels like there's a premeditated process, here, in terms of timing.

1\. Tobacco Cigarettes emerge as public health scare in the late 1990's.

2\. McDonaldsization of Coffee via Starbucks in the late 1990's.

3\. Cigarettes taxed and regulated with punishing costs and counter-media-
manipulation.

4\. Bindings introduced to market coffee with free wi-fi, boosting high-end
coffee's incidental exposure to novice internet users at a time when caffeine
is very-nearly required to negotiate the ever-expanding terrain of new
technologies. (it's just good business, of course)

5\. Millions of former nicotine addicts herded away from nicotine to
expensive, premium high dose caffeine alternatives, serving as stimulant to
wean many down off of nicotine cravings with new habits.

6\. 20 years later, with ordinary tobacco cigarettes habits all-but-destroyed,
across two generations of former users, and new technologies now well
established, coffee habits can wind down. A mild campaign against coffee is
introduced. See: acrylamide, poor stock performance, racial sensitivity
incidents in liminal zones of large franchise chain restaurants.

7\. Emerging technologies, now ready for maturity may be re-introduced with
new players. These entities work to re-normalize a newly engineered and tested
concept in managed synthetic addiction, with status symbol oriented marketing
plays.

Why vaping is anything is beyond me, but I feel like this represents the
fundamentals of a broader subversive program to phase out agricultural-
plantation-oriented modes of daily-use otc psychoactives that play vital roles
in common universal social norms that cut across a wide array of global
cultural customs.

~~~
scythe
If you've ever tried nicotine you'll quickly understand why caffeine could
never substitute for it. Sure, they're both stimulants. But nicotine
_decreases_ anxiety. Caffeine increases it.

~~~
hymen0ptera
Actually, they both do the same thing, but attack different sides of the mood
slope.

Which you'd know, if you ever stopped to consider how to adjust your mood with
either.

Caffeine introduces anxiety and irritability on downslope, after about two
half-lives, or 12-ish hours (6 hour half life). On the up slope, caffeine
provides a long slowly declining period of alertness and performance. The
initial buzz comes on strong and tapers off over time.

People seek caffeine to perform. But a slow sinking feeling appears near the
end of the day.

Nicotine modifies mood on the other side of the bend, with it's presence
evening out irritability with immediate relief. The trail off goes unnoticed
until a sudden urge kicks in, to bump one's self back up onto the plateau.

Nicotine is sought to cure or cool an immediate pang, which leaves the
impression of easing into relaxation, which degrades silently until suddenly
noticed as an urge to re-up.

The perception of nicotine is downtime, even though the dosage process and
serum curve is the usual spike and tapered downslope, people learn modify the
nicotine downslope differently, by catching the drop-off before cravings
become desperate.

Which is why cigarettes are designed as they are, and achieve product success
the way they do. Metering doses at an almost hourly rate, with twenty dose
packs marketed to afford exactly that behavior.

Coffee, as a liquid, is readily either sipped or chugged as needed, and has
different preparation and consumption habits, so its marketing is different.

Caffeine's downslope is handled differently, since the withdrawal effects, are
separated by longer distances of up to 48 hours, and because circadian rhythms
are more drastically effected. Consuming in the late afternoon results in
insomnia, so the better choice is to cure the anxious late day mood
disruptions with food and alcohol, and stave off withdrawal (vasodilation
migraines, etc) the next morning.

~~~
scythe
I use both regularly. I never notice the "downslope" of caffeine, although
maybe that's my tolerance.

The neurology is totally different. Caffeine primarily affects the heart rate
via adenosine (A1R) antagonism. Nicotine binds to the ion channel nAChR which
is expressed all over the brain and the nervous system. Full agonists of nAChR
cause convulsive seizures, while antagonists are paralytic, but nicotine is a
partial agonist, producing a sort of stability.

That's why nicotine is anxiolytic: it interferes with spikes and droughts of
acetylcholine, smoothing the highs and lows of neural activation. The brain
responds by "sensitizing", changing acetylcholine more dramatically in
response to stimuli, and increasing the density of nACh receptors. That's why
nicotine withdrawal is so awful: every mood is enhanced and you can't calm
down.

By contrast, caffeine, which primarily affects the A1 receptors that are
expressed in cardiac neurons and smooth muscle tissue, is obviously never
anxiolytic. A faster heartbeat does not produce calmness. The faster heartbeat
increases the availability of energy in the brain and muscle, producing
wakefulness. It has some other effects in the brain, particularly the basal
forebrain, where inhibiting A1 also promotes wakefulness, but the cardiac
effects of A1 dominate its practical effects to the extent that A1 agonists
(opposite of caffeine) have never been implemented as sedatives because of
their tendency to produce life-threatening drops in heart rate and blood
pressure.

You'd think, having studied this so much, I'd be more responsible, but humans
are a funny animal. Anyway, there's no way a pure stimulant is going to
substitute for an anxiolytic that takes effect in ten seconds. It makes sense
in zero realities.

