Vaping started with e-cigarettes, they looked like cigarettes and tried to taste like cigarettes. Mostly it was Blu, which was a commercially advertised version, but you could get better ones if you looked. They were basically a smoking cessation device, gum/patches, but with the form factor, look, and sorta the feel of smoking.
Being a cessation aid, they were priced pretty heavy… And people like me started getting into reverse engineering them (I have 510 sized taps and dies, and various other tools I’ve made over the years as this progressed). people started using much bigger batteries, people came up with drippers, it’s essentially just a lithium battery with a piece of resistance wire, you can easily make a vape, the term “mod” came about because we were modifying things to use as vapes, flashlights, Hammond project boxes, altoid tins…
Meanwhile, it’s all gaining traction, jenny mcarthy and Stephen dorff are all over the TV telling people it’s just water vapor (incorrect, it’s theatrical fog really) and to “take back their freedom”, Blu got popular, and modders started getting serious and mods got commercialized.
Then bada-boom, vape shops started popping up everywhere… We’d sorted out that vape juice is two alcohols used in fog machines, a flavor (like loranns candy flavors, I used those early on because they’re easy to find), and nicotine (liquid, if you bring a pack of dentine to my house I can turn it into nicotine gum at whatever dose you like in seconds, nicorette is robbing motherfuckers blind). Literally anyone can mix up ejuice, and that was what drove the vape shop boom.
During that time, smoking took a dive. A big one. States get a check every year from tobacco companies, based on sales in the state. It’s ostensibly to pay for the damages done to smokers… And the checks, based on sales, also took a dive. There was also a dent in the sin taxes.
So the FDA jumps in, the NHS in UK takes notice (because less smokers means less public money spent on healthcare), and the FDA immediately says you can’t call e-cigarettes a smoking cessation aid, and the UK decides vapes are 90+% safer yhan smoking and starts prescribng vapes for free…
Fast forward through a decade of propaganda, and it’s “think of the children” and ban vapes… Ban ban ban… Evil bad vapes…
I can’t tell you as an absolute fact that the disparity between the UK NHS recommending vapes, and the US banning them is because the UK saves money if people don’t smoke, and the states lose money if people don’t smoke, but I told you the story of how we got to this point, an I’ll let you do the math :)
This isn’t about menthol IMHO, because of the lack of specificity… They just ninja banned vaping. Cigarette flavored vapes are flavored “tobacco products” (because the FDA says so… Literally). They’ll ease it in there, but I’m pretty sure this ban was the goalpost, and personally, I think it constitutes death warrants in the interest of their budget…