Vapes were meant to help people quit cigarettes. Now non-smokers are taking up vaping
One million people who never smoked now vape, and I keep turning that number over because it exposes a quiet assumption we all made. We assumed vaping was a bridge from cigarettes to clean air. Instead it looks like a brand new island where people are happy to live. The smoking cessation crowd built a tool that turned out to be desirable on its own terms, which is a strange kind of success and a strange kind of failure at the same time.
I'd want to know who these million people are. If they're mostly teenagers who would never have smoked anyway, that changes the story completely. If they're middle-aged ex-smokers who swapped one habit for another, it's a different kind of news. The ONS data gives us the headline number but not the texture.
What fascinates me is the biology underneath. Nicotine is a weird molecule. The smoke carries the danger, while the molecule itself is fairly harmless. We engineered the delivery system to remove the poison, and suddenly it became attractive to people who had no reason to want it. That's the kind of unexpected consequence that makes you wonder what other safer versions of risky things we're about to invent.