It's Not a Cigarette. It's Not a Vape. and It's Big in Japan

Personally, though I don’t smoke I am not particularly bothered by the smell. I’d rather smell cigarettes than other, more acceptable scents such as from incense or even certain types of ladies’ perfumes.

The history is covered in the excellent book[0] and documentary film[1] Big Vape, which I highly recommend. Also fascinating the USCF tobacco library[2], the compendium of internal documents, advertising, etc turned over during the Big Tobacco lawsuits.

[0] https://www.jamieducharme.com/big-vape-book

[1] https://www.netflix.com/title/81444184

[2] https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/

"The first time I saw an IQOS, the innovative tobacco product on which Philip Morris International is betting billions of dollars to replace cigarettes, was at a wedding in 2016. A friend had excitedly pulled me outside to try this new device that had enabled him to finally kick his smoking habit. Not quite a cigarette because it didn't ignite, not quite a vape because it used actual tobacco, supposedly less toxic than conventional cigarettes but satisfying enough to compete with them, it seemed that this heated tobacco might be the future of nicotine."

Example of one: https://dutchie.com/stores/lake-of-the-woods/product/atmos-j...

What if civilization depends on nicotine and without it, we devolve back to the stone age?

That being said, I need to complain about Reason a bit here. Right-libertarians have an understandable aversion to anything that smells like a prohibition policy, and I can agree with most of that. However, we need to be particularly careful with the tobacco industry, which has historically proven itself to be particularly slippery. A decade and change ago, back when I read Reason, CATO, LvMI, and so on religiously[2], I remember reading almost the same article, but it was about vapes.

Vapes were supposed to be the harm reduction silver bullet. The theory went that the harmful product in cigarettes was the smoke[0], so if you took out the smoke, you had something that wouldn't kill smokers. In reality, vapes had their own toxic by-products that can kill your lungs in all sorts of new and different ways. This article does nothing to assuage my fears that we're going to see a bunch of people with new lung diseases in a decade's time thanks to a new tobacco product.

Furthermore, harm reduction should never be implemented in a vacuum, for the same reason why more efficient steam engines greatly increased Victorian England's appetite for coal[1]. If you just put less-harmful cigarettes on the market, more people will smoke them, leading to more lung disease in total. The tobacco industry, being particularly slippery bastards, pumped shittons of money into vapes specifically because the lower harm meant more scale and thus growth. They even found ways to advertise these things to kids with hilariously ineffective and terrible PSAs about the dangers of teen vaping.

You cannot make an entirely safe, or even 'acceptably safe' tobacco product. Addiction is a harm in and of itself, but it has multiplicative effects with other harms. The chemicals that you suck up vaping wouldn't be nearly as harmful but for the fact that people addicted to nicotine are going to vape way more often[3]. So I tend to be very skeptical of harm reduction plans that boil down to "just sell less harmful tobacco with no plans to dissuade new smokers from smoking". Heated tobacco isn't harm reduction, it's Big Tobacco business continuity.

[0] I distinctly remember seeing a Senator talking about smoking lettuce leaves at one point. It wound up somewhere in an Auto-Tune The News video.

[1] This is known as the Jevons Paradox. Genuinely surprised that Reason of all things isn't invoking it.

[2] Yes, I too used to be a right-libertarian shithead! News at 11.

[3] In fact, I would not be surprised if nicotine vaping produces more lung disease than, say, THC vaping, purely because nicotine is way more addictive than weed.