Electronic cigarettes were a product a long time in the making, with many architects. The concept dates in a serious way to the 1920s; the first patents were issued to American inventor Henry A. Gilbert in the mid-1960s; in the late 1990s, former NASA engineer and microprocessor pioneer Phil Ray experimented with a new, non-smoking technology. Although Ray’s efforts didn’t go anywhere commercially, they did deliver the word “vape” to the lexicon.
The big breakthrough arrived 15 years ago. It was achieved by a Chinese chemist named Hon Lik, whose motivations were a combination of intellectual curiosity and entrepreneurial rewards -- and human welfare. Cigarette smoking had hastened his father’s death. Hon Lik had a heavy tobacco habit himself, and was experimenting with ways to quit.
Essential Reading
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Bottom Line: E-cigarette taxes raise e-cigarette prices, reduce e-cigarette sales, and increase sales of traditional cigarettes, which are a direct substitute of e-cigarettes. E-ciga...
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Bottom Line: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) are pursuing a political rather than a public health agenda by falsely claiming that e-ci...
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Bottom Line: Taxing e-cigarettes could be counterproductive to public health as there is consensus about the benefits of them as substitutes for non-combustible nicotine or tobacco p...
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Bottom Line: This series of economic and fiscal impact summaries of e-cigarettes in Alabama, California, Indiana, and Massachusetts reveal that vaping has created thousands of jobs a...
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Bottom Line: E-cigarettes (ECs) offered in a pharmacy setting are more than three times as likely to help smokers quit after four to six weeks than nicotine replacement therapy (NRT)...
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