Seven weeks ago, Vape N Chill began business in Ada. Located on Main Street (across from McDonald’s), Vape N Chill is a shop that sells everything from e-cigarettes to e-hookahs, e-liquids to vaporizers.
Upon entering Vape N Chill, visitors are immediately consumed with the ‘vape culture’ that the shop embodies. They smell the fruity vapors, see the shirts, posters and vaping supplies, and hear the alternative metal music darting softly through a screen of non-carcinogenic vapor that fills the room.
Vape N Chill represents the rapid increase in popularity that vaping has seen in the past two years. According to the Wall Street Journal, there are now an estimated 8,500 vape shops in the United States, accumulating approximately 1.2 billion dollars in sales. This increase in revenue directly correlates to the rise in e-cig usage, and the subsequent drop in the usage of traditional cigarettes.
On April 17, the CDC announced that the number of middle and high school students using electronic cigarettes tripled between 2013 and 2014. This is accompanied by an unprecedented drop in tobacco cigarette usage; 12.7 percent of high schoolers said they had smoked in the last 30 days in 2013, compared to just 9.2 percent in 2014.
Although the appearance of vaping might still cause people to believe that it promotes ‘smoking culture,’ the aforementioned statistics show that it actually takes away from it. For Vape N Chill clerk Shane Jones, that is the goal.
“Mainly, [our goal] would be to get people off cigarettes,” Jones said. “So, that’s what we try to do. We try to help.”
Vaping, a term that includes everything from the usage of e-cigarettes to high-voltage vaporizers, is generally more chemically safe than normal cigarettes (or other tobacco products). While some e-cigs contain traces of nicotine, other types are nicotine-free, and they also lack the carcinogenic tars and gases that cigarettes produce in the smoke.
Vaping is also becoming a more socially acceptable smoking alternative.
“It’s appealing because you can do it pretty much anywhere, and it’s a lot more acceptable than smoking cigarettes,” Gavin Grabowski, a freshman at Ohio Northern University, said. “It doesn’t smell as bad, there are flavors, and it’s a lot more friendly, too. People can get used to it a lot easier.”
A subset of the vaping trend is vape competitions, where ‘vapers,’ as the participants are called, try to blow the biggest cloud of vapor. Jones believes that these vape competitions attract vapers of all ages to the smoking alternative.
“A lot of younger people are into it because they can mess with it. The whole cloud thing- getting bigger clouds for cloud competitions and stuff like that- that’s basically why younger people are into it,” Jones said.
Vape competitions are being held across the country, as well as in Canada and Indonesia. Contestants pay winners up to $2,000, and competitors are now signing with sponsors to curtail their travel costs.
So maybe, just maybe, vaping can help put the fatal dagger into a storied culture of tobacco smoking that finds itself limping further into the 21st century. As cigarette smoking slowly declines in popularity amongst teens, e-cigarettes and other vaping products might be taking the smoking throne. Except this time, the kings of the smoking industry will be good guys- with competitions instead of addiction, and juice instead of poison.