Not really. The major tobacco manufacturers dominate e-cig marketshare in the US.
The way it benefits them is that smaller players can afford the regulation less, ensuring the tobacco manufacturers can get a total lock on the market.
I'm curious what leads you to believe this? Perhaps they lead in the "gas station disposables" market, but almost no one uses those. Anyone serious about using an ecig uses the larger 650 (minimum) mah batteries with detachable ~atomizers (because nothing smaller than that performs adequately) and those are manufactured almost exclusively by independent Chinese companies and sold via independent websites and retail stores.
All the available sales data, such as this: http://www.journalnow.com/blu-ecigs-brand-has-lost-market-sh...
According to Nielsen data as of May 16, Vuse has a 35.7 percent U.S. market share as measured by all distribution channels for e-cigs. Vuse is available at more than 100,000 retail outlets nationwide.
Blu eCigs was second in market share at 22.7 percent, while Logic was third at 13.8 percent. Logic was bought recently by Japan Tobacco.
There is a lot of data missing from independent vape shops, yes. But the numbers we have indicate Big Tobacco is moving near a billion dollars worth of e-cigs a year.
> Anyone serious about using an ecig uses the larger 650 (minimum) mah batteries with detachable ~atomizers (because nothing smaller than that performs adequately) and those are manufactured almost exclusively by independent Chinese companies and sold via independent websites and retail stores.
People serious about coffee buy their own beans sourced from great growers, get a grinder, etc etc. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the millions of people who buy coffee get it from places like McDonald's and Starbucks and instant coffee containers.
And at any rate, parts and liquids sourced from independent Chinese companies and sold via independent websites sounds exactly like the kind of thing that should be regulated and inspected.
> Nevertheless, the vast majority of the millions of people who buy coffee get it from places like McDonald's and Starbucks and instant coffee containers.
I suppose one might think this is a valid comparison, but it simply is not. Try this: for the next few weeks when you're out and about, pay attention to the types of ecigs people are using in public, I guarantee you it isn't the tiny Blu or Vuse disposables; I see at least 25 people a day using ecigs in the wild, and I have literally never seen anyone using one of these disposables that is being reported on in that statistic.
Or if you are genuinely curious in discovering the correct answer to this question:
https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette
https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/search?q=vuse&...
https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/search?q=blu&r...
Based on the virtually unanimous opinion on reddit (or any other ecig forum for that matter) that disposables suck, as well as never seeing them in public, I find that "a little" hard to believe.
Most people don't have Sennheisers.
And college campuses (and the areas around them) are totally a representative cross-section of the general; population on all things, including mechanisms of tobacco consumption, right?
Your tone makes it sound like you're kind of hostile to the very idea, do you have some personal attachment to the matter?
The fact that they are demonstrably not representative of the general population by age, income, education, or, really, just about any other variable that has been studied makes it very unlikely that they'd be, except coincidentally, representative as far as purchasing patterns for any particular good for which a variety of options exists (unless its a good purchases nearly exclusively by college students, but that's clearly not the case here.)
I suppose one might think this is a valid comparison, but it simply is not. Who you encounter isn't a representative sample of the population, its skewed by your own age, location, socioeconomic class, etc.
It was actually incredible to me that e-cigs got away with so little regulation for so long in the first place. The only thing I'm worried about is it's too little, too late: there are a lot of people now who are hooked on nicotine who weren't before, and the constant barrage of marketing claiming they are perfectly safe is only making matters worse.
And yes, I recognize that it possibly has some use in helping smokers quit or move to a nicotine delivery system that is most probably less harmful. If that's the justification for e-cigs, then limit sales to smokers.
E-cigarettes are 100x dorkier than cigarettes and much more annoying to use. Virtually none of my smoker friends stick with them for very long.
I said "who weren't before", i.e., there are new nicotine addicts who became addicted through e-cig usage (and probably would not have become addicted otherwise.) I did not say, and I doubt, that there are more nicotine addicts than before given the general downward trend in smoking.
I generally see two types of people vaping or using e-cigs: middle schoolers and smokers who want an additional fix, often in places they aren't allowed to smoke - for some reason a huge number of vapers, etc. think that no-smoking rules don't apply to them. I've seen people get violent over being asked to stop vaping in a no-smoking area twice.
I guess I'm saying: I'm really skeptical of your claim that e-cigarettes are introducing more people to smoking. Cigarettes already do a pretty amazing job of introducing people to smoking.
† As the parent of someone who was a middle schooler just last year, let me add that I would be flabbergasted to see one of them vaping, but not entirely surprised to see them with a cigarette. If I saw a teenager vaping, "tobacco" would not be my first guess as to the intoxicant involved.
I framed it the way I did because all I have is anecdotes. When I say "a lot of people are addicted to nicotine that weren't before" this is substantiated by my personal knowledge of around three dozen individuals.
> I'm really skeptical of your claim that e-cigarettes are introducing more people to smoking.
There are more than three hundred million people in the US. E-cigs are a multibillion dollar industry. It would be astonishing if there was no one introduced to nicotine by e-cigs.
> vaping indoors was pretty common a couple years ago, it's been more than a year since I saw anyone do it in Chicago.
> As the parent of someone who was a middle schooler just last year, let me add that I would be flabbergasted to see one of them vaping,
Some of this is probably cultural. I've never been to Chicago, but Chicago friends tell me that people are generally much health-focused in Chicago. I live in a southern rural area, and from what a teacher friend tells me and from my own observation, about a third of local middle schoolers vape. I can definitely believe this is an outlier, but even that's too much, in my opinion, considering it didn't have to be that way. There are much fewer smokers, and that's been about constant.
This city is practically made of sausage. Its official vegetable is bacon.
I'm sure someone, somewhere has gotten hooked on nicotine by way of e-cigarettes, but it's nowhere close to cigarettes. A 12 year old can get a pack of cigarettes and hand them out to their friends. Try that with one of those dorky e-cig pens.
> Try that with one of those dorky e-cig pens.
They just pass them around if someone doesn't have one.
[1] http://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/cdph/CDP...
I think you're wrong about the general argument you're trying to make about e-cigarettes.
About 2 of every 100 middle school students (2.3%) reported in 2015 that they smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/youth...
Findings from the 2014 National Youth Tobacco Survey show that current e-cigarette use (use on at least 1 day in the past 30 days) among high school students increased from 4.5 percent in 2013 to 13.4 percent in 2014, rising from approximately 660,000 to 2 million students http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p0416-e-cigarette-use...
PS: Why do you constantly say stuff like this when fact's are clearly not on your side?
During 2000--2009, the prevalence of current tobacco use among middle school students declined (15.1% to 8.2%), as did current cigarette use (11.0% to 5.2%) and cigarette smoking experimentation (29.8% to 15.0%)
I don't smoke or vape, but I really don't see why vaping is so unpopular. Is it just "drugs are bad" again? I again don't get it, as nobody complains about seeing people drinking coffee in public. As far as I can tell, caffeine and nicotine are similar drugs with different delivery mechanisms. Except nobody is worried about high school students getting hooked on caffeine from flavored coffee beverages.
Unfortunately my friends of friends who vape didn't get this memo. People who never would have picked up smoking are now addicted to vaping.
It's also a bluenose idea: Kids are using a mind altering drug! OMG! Other than the approved ones like caffeine in Mountain Dew and Coke, which, with the sugar, are certainly more harmful than nicotine.
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/press_releases/post/2016_05_0...
You could say the same thing about most products.
Imagine if every food on the market had to pay a million dollars to get certified.
If the FDA wanted to run a generic study on whether vaping was safe, I would applaud it. Even if it charged ten million dollars across the entire industry to fund that study, that would be fine. But making every manufacturer go through an independent highly-expensive process is a product of regulatory capture, not to keep anyone safe.
Even if the individual drugs have their own certification, mixing them and packaging them together requires a new certification. Now of course, the new cert will rely heavily on the existing docs, so it's not like everything has to be re-proved again, but the interaction & effects thereof are scrutinized a bit more heavily.
Of course this is assuming that the goal of the FDA is to genuinely protect consumers.
I'm aware of at least one component - styrene - which has been linked to cancer and is commonly present in fragrances.