The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.
That doesn't explain why vapes are so rife elsewhere, particularly the UK. They're popular because, as the FT described, they're the ultimate product. Cool, cheap and addictive.
It was one of those rush laws. They are still for sale, I walk past a "BULK OUTLET FOR ELF-BAR" shop sign when I walk to work.
It's one of those UK laws of "we are doing something!" but not actually do anything. These companies either pay backhand or know how to skirt around the rule. Who's enforcing it?
Hardly, they banned fully disposable. You can still by them but now you can swap in a refill cartridge. The price of this refillable one is the same as the original.
Many places apparently don't even sell the refills so it's practically the same.
Surprisingly, Big Tobacco does not really likes vapes because it's not them, and eats in their profit margin. If any, they lobby against vapes and specifically disposable vapes.
YMMV, but it's been the case in France. They were behind the ban on disposable non rechargeable vapes, because kids bought them as a candy. They'd prefer they buy actual cigarettes.
Well, since pretty much everything that consumes power today has an MCU in it, simple MCUs are extremely cheap. Volumes are immense. They are also space efficient and it is easy to manufacture PCBAs with them. They also occupy that sweet spot where the need for low power consumption means that you use gate sizes that are fairly largeish -- manufacturing processes and technology that is much, much cheaper than what is used for CPUs for instance.
Same thing with batteries. Ridiculous volume -> low prices. (Laptops and cell phones is why we have usable electric cars. If the EV industry had to drive up the volume all on its own it would have taken much longer to develop that industry)
Kids don't have to hide proof of their consumption in their bedroom (well at least until they are hooked enough they can't spend a night without vaping). They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
Your point is quite valid, but example is wrong. Those vapes can have a lot of puff in them, they need to be really heavy smoker to smoke out in 1 session.
But reuseable vape has more stuff to manage and hide, and they are more expensive in short run.
I think just an oversight—disposables weren't really around at the time the time that the ban happened. 2019, people were mostly smoking Juul and having those crazy custom rigs that they fill with the juice. Disposables really started to take off around 2021 - 2022. Atleast that's what I saw with people around me in NY and California.
Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice.
Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.
I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.
The FDA just hates flavored nicotine products because they're appealing (to both adults and children), and the FDA doesn't want nicotine products to be appealing (because nicotine is perceived to be a public health problem on the scale of tobacco).
Weed disposables are a whole rabbit hole by themselves.
You want to buy a disposable? Ok, here, $20 and you're done.
But if you want to make the oil at home? Ok, $2000 for lights, timers, nutrients, seeds, and a grow tent. Plus another ~$10,000 for a basic short path distillation setup. And honestly to make anything close to what you get in the disposables, you'll need to hire an expert with experience. And you need a lot of space for your new secret lab. For 99.999% of people, it's super not worth it to make at home.
Your home grow prices are high (even setting aside that you can just buy flower instead of the disposable vape). The right range is hundreds of dollars. And I'm sure making good oil costs somewhat more, but you can make crappy dab sludge (wax?) with some scissors, $10 of isopropyl alcohol, and a baking dish ("QWISO"), and that sludge can be loaded in some kinds of reusable vape.
Im talking about making full melt distillate. Crappy dab sludge can't go in a cart. It requires actual distillation to make what they put in the carts. QWISO is a joke.
I promise you, if it was easy, you would see more people making carts. I tried C02, water wash, sifting, heat press, everything you can think of. Its nowhere near the same. And that's just for the bare minimum distillate. We're not even talking about live resin or anything fancy.
You basically need a small factory to get close to the quality of the carts.
And my home grow prices are low. You cant just grow 2 or 4 plants if you want even a small steady supply of full melt wax. Like, 20 plants minimum is more close. And they have to be good. Living soil, aeroponic, whatever you want.
And that's if you can get actually good yield. I've seen people get such bad yield that they turn 1 pound of flower into less than 3 grams of wax. That's why you need an expert. Even putting together a successful distillation operation is no joke. Besides chemistry knowledge, you need lots of "industrial equipment" knowledge. We're not talking about using a heat press or a curling iron to make "dabs". We're talking about making the real shit.
To be honest 10k is in the range of the cheapest alibaba eqipment. Most commercial outfits, even smaller ones, use much more expensive equipment.
This is why people prefer to just buy it from the store for $20.
Did that in Australia - the problem is even worse now. Disposable vapes were a market response to banning and restricting pod vapes (where you can keep the base and just swap out the pod).
Nicotine policy and policing has been a clusterf - not only are there wasteful disposable vapes everywhere, but a thriving black market that has lead to firebombings and murders.
Sounds like they didnt ban it properly. There aren't really nicotine junkies like heroin. So I suspect ban nicotine and slowly everyone stops using nicotine sources.
Everyone I know who vapes nicotine is a junkie about it.
In fact, nicotine habits can be harder to kick than heroin. I know plenty of people who have tried to kick nicotine many times and cannot stay off of it.
Anyway, it's moot, because outright banning tobacco is insane.
Kind of odd because the withdrawal is, physically, less taxing than caffeine (never mind opiates...), and yet the brain rewiring to chase the hit is somehow far more pernicious.
New Zealand was making really good progress on getting down the smoking rate with a variety of measures (primarily ramping the tax).
The current government has started rolling back decades of progress, and SURPRISE, they have close ties to the tobacco industry including MPs who worked for tobacco companies.
As mentioned upthread, Australia has been running a similar strategy of trying to tax smoking out of existence and all that's happened is they've rediscovered the Laffer curve as well as pushing otherwise law-abiding citizens towards illegal tobacco.
There's a limit to how much sin tax people are prepared to put up with. Either its legal to consume or it's not, and vapes are far less objectionable to be near by than traditional cigarettes. It bemuses me that Aus, NZ, Singapore etc have gone down the path of trying to ban vape usage when the alternative is far worse.
NZ isn’t trying to ban it, not at all. Winston Peters loves tobacco. This government loves the tobacco industry, to the extent that it has them helping with legislation (industry documents mysteriously getting used to write policy). Casey Costello is a corrupt joke.
Having just spent a bit of time travelling, I think vapes are worse to be near than cigarettes or cigars.
Walking down busy street in the UK is just so gross. The sickly sweet strawberry, cinnamon etc. I’d prefer tobacco smoke.
And at least there was some etiquette around tobacco smoking. You don’t often encounter it inside, in planes, trains, theatres, malls etc. all those were going on this month.
They are straight up banned in Australia but you often see them chucked in the gutters and rivers. Only seems like they started raiding the stores in the last few months.
The vape ban in Australia is utterly stupid though. All vapes are banned, not just disposables, and guess what's easier to discretely sell to kids from a newsagency.
Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
They're not all banned, you just need a prescription to get one which realistically should've been implemented day 0.
Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll reduce the number of users and make it more cost prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.
Yeah I don't think my doctor is going to give me a cannabis vape prescription, though admittedly I haven't asked.
I don't see how making vapes prescription only changes the situation with children, which is that all tobacco products are illegal to sell or provide to a person under 18. Cracking down on the sale of tobacco to children does not require tobacco products to be made prescription only, these are orthogonal issues. All this does is drive profit towards shonky pill doctors who advertise on facebook that one cheap over the phone appointment is all you need to "feel great again" and other euphemisms, and will give you any pill you ask for regardless of the medical suitability.
Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian, but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather hear people's opinions then ask AI.
> If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.
I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased health. It increased safety for women and children and reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol positively affects non-drinkers too.
It was the organised crime side effects and societal unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I wouldn't want to live there.
Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that continue to raise their head from time to time here and there, e.g. coronavirus responses.
Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.
It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.
People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.
A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
> People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted.
Isn't this exactly what happens, and why cigarette advertising is banned in many countries, and why marketing child-friendly tobacco products is commonly restricted, and why there are even regulations/guidelines around portrayal of smoking on TV in some regions?
People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
I think not banning the cigarette and non reusable vape is the wrong solution but banning smoking in lots of public spaces has improved the situation, maybe not to curb consumption but at least non smokers can breath a little. I wish it would also applies to outdoors cafe/restaurant terraces too as smokers effectively ban to non smokers by spreading their poison around them. They could walk away for a couple of minutes to get their hit but they don't on purpose. There should be a radius around an outdoor terrace where smoking is effectively prohibited.
Outdoor cafes/restaurant terraces that allow smoking effectively are marketing to smokers. Smokers generally stay longer (therefore may order more), and basically are giving themselves dopamine at this venue, therefore creating associations to possibly draw them back in the future. These places could just not provide ashtrays and could just not allow smoking, but they do allow it, because it's good for business.
If you really don't like it, you could just not visit these establishments. To these businesses, the benefit of allowing smoking doesn't outweigh the negatives (some people not liking it). Obviously you don't not like it enough to just not go there. Not a smoker, but i've never understood this puritanical attitude towards smoking and only smoking. Yeah, it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in an outdoor space, I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality, etc.
> If you really don't like it, you could just not visit these establishments.
Well I go inside, because there are no establishment in my area that ban smoking in their terrace.
> it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in an outdoor space,
It is exactly the same unless there is significant wind is in a direction that push the fumes away. Obviously it depends on how tightly the tables are put as well but it is just super annoying. I have a friend whose eyes turn red immediately when exposed to tobacco product fumes and he suffers way more than I do.
Also it ruins the taste of food and drinks.
> I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality
Usually those that are close to traffic and car exhaust are less popular than those that are less directly Unless you live in a complete smog, cigarettes/vapes fumes that goes directly to your face are always more annoying.
You would have compared to sweaty and smelly bodies in a dance club you would have got a point.
> People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
This thread is/was about prohibition of smoking. I was making the point that tobacco/nicotine is a drug that has positive psychoactive effects, that's why people use it.
People seem to have this misconception that smoking is just some thing tobacco companies tricked people into doing and so prohibition would work. It wouldn't. We can already see in places where the prices of cigarettes create a nearly de-facto ban that it creates black markets and we know that black markets create crime.
Hence legalizing where you can smoke vs prohibition of the sale. There will always be some private place hosting semi-public parties where people can smoke but if you enforce non smoking in public areas that forces everyone to reduce a bit their consumption, makes it more an antisocial thing and allow those that don't like being exposed to it.
I was suprised to see recently that ban on smoking is still not enforced in some bars/club playing music in Germany. It was like a blast from the past to me after living in countries that implemented that strict ban much more seriously for years.
Singapore and AFAIK Thailand banned vapes altogether. And it seems to be actually enforced.
They have completely different grounds for it but still, there's already some movement in this space.
In Thailand, regular smoking is shunned by the public but vapes are literally everywhere.
I've even seen 15-16 year old boys in Thailand pick up their girlfriends on motorbikes, race their friends to the food court, drink a couple of beers and vape once they get there, then ride their girlfriends home again while still under the influence, all without helmets mind you.
Not. I've seen young teenagers vape in Thailand, that's how enforced it is. They only catch foreigners from whom they can extract thousand-dollar bribes.
They do seem to be banned in an around 10 states at this point though there is some sort of existing stock law or something so if you ask them you still seem to be able to buy them. They don’t seem to be on display anymore though.
