The Great Vape Debate - Free Times

Columbia Businesses Fear New Rules Will Blow Away Their Industry

By Eva Moore
Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Photos by Thomas Hammond
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It’s Saturday night, and the air at Whit E. Octopus Vapors’ converted warehouse space on Huger Street is thick with haze — not smoke, but the unique dense mist that comes from a roomful of people vaping. It rubs up against the back of your throat and makes it hard to see the corners of the dimly lit room, but it’s nothing like the clingy intensity of cigarette smoke. There are about 30 people here to watch or participate in this Aug. 6 competition: a double-elimination challenge to see who can do the best vaping tricks.

The contestants — mostly men, mostly in their 20s and 30s — suck on their various vaping devices and blow out enormous puffs that break into rings, balls, streams, ripples. They blow rings through other rings. It’s easy to pick out the elite vapers, with their sharp rings and well-timed exhalations — but the supportive, tight-knit crowd and other contestants applaud everyone, no matter how distinct their clouds.

But change is in the air.

Just two days later, on Aug. 8, new U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations on the vaping industry went into effect, essentially requiring vaping products to be regulated in the same way as tobacco. And the folks who work at Whit E. Octopus and some other Columbia vaping businesses are afraid these new rules will devastate their booming young industry.

“To be in charge of your own destiny, you run your own business,” says Luke Moore, who founded Whit E. Octopus two and a half years ago with the money from his and his wife’s tax refund. “We’re in a high growth industry with a decent profit margin. Everything you see here today started with $500.”

But, chimes in Scott Wallace, who works with Moore, “After [Aug. 8], this isn’t going to happen anymore.” He waves his hand around at the vaping lounge and bar, the spotless lab where they mix their vaping liquid, the room where they fill orders from across the United States and the United Kingdom.

So what is vaping, anyway? Basically, vapers use an electronic tool — usually a tube-shaped vaporizer called a vape pen, or a mechanical vaporizer called a vape mod — to heat up some liquid to the boiling point, then inhale the resulting aerosol. The liquid — called e-liquid, e-juice, vape juice or a variety of other names — is generally a blend of propylene glycol (found in everything from shampoo to “non-toxic antifreeze”) and vegetable glycerin (found everywhere from soap to prepared baked goods), plus (usually) nicotine and flavorings.

Most insiders make a distinction between vaping and mass-market e-cigarettes — the kind you can buy at the gas station, that are often shaped like a cigarette. The technology is basically the same, but the products and the culture are very different.

On the one hand, vaping could suffer under the new regulations. On the other hand, there are a lot of question marks. Vaping is a young phenomenon; it’s really only in the past five years that it’s become widespread. There haven’t been long-term studies of its effects on the body. While some scientists and doctors argue that vaping is less harmful than smoking or chewing tobacco, and that that’s good enough, others aren’t so sure. And the industry was, up until now, largely unregulated: Companies that make vaping liquid are only now required to use childproof containers, apply nicotine warning labels and avoid selling to minors. Then there are the vapers themselves — a passionate, evangelistic bunch, to say the least.



KURE Vaporium held its grand opening July 19 in the Vista.

“It’s killing the artisans and the innovators is ultimately what it’s doing,” Wallace says of the FDA’s clampdown.

Budding Business

You’d never know the vaping industry was under threat given its rapid growth locally.

In the Columbia city limits alone, there are at least 19 vaping-related businesses, according to Roger Myers, the city’s business license administrator. While Myers doesn’t have exact figures on how quickly that number has grown, he says there were nowhere near that many when he took over the job three years ago.

The most recent arrival on the Columbia vaping scene is KURE, a regional chain of ritzy vaping lounge franchises.

Its most famous investor? Jadeveon Clowney, former star Gamecocks defensive end, now a pro football player for the Houston Texans. Other investors in the local KURE include Bakari Sellers, a former Democratic state representative, now a CNN commentator; and Ken and Cindy Long of local Long’s Pharmacy.

Those little hints of medical approval — a name that suggests both tobacco curing and the curing of illnesses, investors who own a pharmacy — are rife in the vaping industry.

But Clowney doesn’t vape, at least according to his fellow investors. The football star from Rock Hill is interested in vaping because his mom was a smoker, and because KURE’s lounges struck him as cool, chairman Martin Sumichrast told sports and culture site The Ringer. (Sellers told Free Times he doesn’t vape either.)

At the July 19 grand opening for the lounge, $35 would get you a selfie with Clowney, some autographed merchandise, a food coupon for nearby breastaurant (yes, that’s an industry term) Twin Peaks, and a bottle of “Clowney’s Hit” vaping liquid.

“This isn’t your dad’s vape shop,” the KURE website boasts. “This is you greeted at the door and handed a leather-bound menu. This is you discovering your own unique flavor profile with the expertise of your own personal KURATOR. This is you, all chill and finding your own flavor from a lounge chair.”



Brandon Plemmons participates in a vaping competition held Aug. 6 at Whit E. Octopus Vapors in Columbia.

If you’re not looking for a high-end club vibe, there are plenty of other kinds of vape shops to choose from. Whit E. Octopus has the feel of a steampunk speakeasy. Some vape shops are head shops that happen to offer some vaping supplies. Others are simple retail outlets popping up in strip malls around the Midlands, not too different from a mobile phone store.

Nationally, estimates of the size of the vaping industry vary, but it’s definitely big.

The Smoke Free Alternatives Trade Association — vaping’s trade group — estimates there are as many as 15,000 vape stores in the country, along with 1,200 manufacturers of e-liquid, not to mention the companies that build hardware. All told, they say, the industry employs more than 70,000 people nationwide.

While many of these companies are small, the big tobacco companies also have a foot in the door. R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company, an offshoot of the tobacco giant, sells the pre-filled electronic cigarette Vuse. Imperial Tobacco Group owns Blu, another e-cigarette. Altria bought an e-vapor business called Green Smoke, Inc. in 2014.

In fact, it’s those big tobacco companies that many in the vaping business believe will benefit from the new FDA regulations.

After all, they’ve been navigating federal tobacco regulations for many years, and they have the size and resources most vaping companies don’t have.

Getting Regulatory

For the past several years, the FDA has been designing regulations on e-cigarettes and vaping. And on Aug. 8, the first of those regulations took effect.



Whit E. Octopus Vapors has a separate lab room for mixing batches of e-liquid.

Starting immediately, businesses have to verify that their customers are 18 or older — though many vaping businesses were already restricting sales to minors, and nobody Free Times spoke with was upset about that particular restriction. Vape shops can no longer show a customer how to set up a vaping device, as doing so would put them under the category of a “tobacco manufacturer.” There are new paperwork requirements. And businesses can no longer offer free samples.

“Even opening a bottle and letting someone smell” the e-juice counts as offering a sample, says Sean Kittrell, a manager at High Life Smoke Shop. The Five Points business sells not only vaping products, but also tobacco products and an assortment of water pipes and other devices.

A separate law that took effect in July requires child safety caps and nicotine warnings on all e-juice.

But the biggest change of all is that vaping products will have to undergo the FDA’s rigorous approval process, which promises to be not only time consuming but expensive. Existing products (which the FDA confusingly calls “new products,” applying that term to anything introduced to the market after February 2007 — so, basically all vaping products) can continue to be sold for the next two years while manufacturers submit their products for approval, and another year while the FDA reviews their applications. Brand-new products — those yet to be rolled out — will have to get FDA approval before being sold.

“I guarantee you you’re about to see a bunch of these companies disappear,” Kittrell says, sweeping his hand over the shelves that stock more than 50 brands of e-juice.

Moore, the Whit E. Octopus owner, says it’ll be far too expensive for him or most other vaping companies to get their products approved. Vaping industry estimates are that each product — not just a particular brand of juice, but each individual flavor and nicotine level of that juice — could cost more than $1 million to navigate the process.

Regulators say that estimate is a little high.

“The FDA estimates that the average costs associated with submitting a Premarket Tobacco Application are likely in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, not in the millions or tens of millions of dollars estimated by some others,” FDA spokesman Michael Felberbaum told Free Times.

“The actions being taken will help the FDA prevent misleading claims by tobacco product manufacturers, evaluate the ingredients of tobacco products and how they are made, as well as communicate their potential risks,” Felberbaum said.

Felberbaum acknowledges that the new regulations “will have an impact on a significant portion of the market.” And so, he says, the agency is working on additional timelines for smaller businesses to comply with some provisions, and offering other forms of instruction and outreach.

For Moore, it’s all too much. He doesn’t believe the government should be involved in regulating his industry at all.

“Regulations, by their nature, create monopolies,” Moore says. “What it does is allows the federal government to pick winners and losers. The federal government wants to provide some form of safety and protection for the populace but … in so doing they’re literally saying, ‘You’re the loser companies, you’re the winner companies.’

“The problem is we’re moving responsibility away from the consumer, putting it on large business, the FDA, and in so doing, wiping out small and medium sized business,” he says. “We don’t live in the 1920s. In the 1920s, traveling salesmen could just go around and hit each community along the path, travel across the U.S. in their horse and wagon, rob one town and move on to the next. We have things like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. We have a way to almost instantaneously review products, get the word out.”

There are several key pending lawsuits against the FDA that could help clarify some of the new regulations in the months and years to come. But it’s a lot to keep up with.

“Why are we depending on the federal government to tell me how to live my life?” Moore asks.

Others in the vaping industry paint a rosier picture. Sumichrast, chairman of KURE, says he wouldn’t be opening vaping lounges if he thought the industry was in danger of vanishing.

“We sort of anticipated these regulations from the time we set the business up a few years ago,” he says.

KURE offers in-store custom blending — a practice some vape lounges have taken the precaution of stopping, fearing they’ll be regulated as manufacturers. But Sumichrast says KURE feels comfortable continuing that practice.

“All our stuff comes from third party FDA-certified labs,” he says. “They come mixed. We do flavor them, but the PG-VG [propylene glycol-vegetable glycerin] and nicotine comes in a sealed container [from the lab]. We don’t feel like we have any exposure there.”

As for getting all vaping products through the FDA approval process, at a cost of (at minimum) hundreds of thousands of dollars per product, Sumichrast thinks that by the time the various lawsuits work their way through the courts, the regulations and timelines could look much different than they do now.

“That’s something that is going to take years and years and years to figure out,” he says. “It’s just overreach. So the courts and the legislators and everyone are going to figure it out. We’ll sell what KURE is legally entitled to sell.”

Ministry of Vaping Culture

A smoker might have a soft spot for her preferred brand. She might, in the olden days of the 1980s and ’90s, have saved up Camel Cash or Marlboro rewards and sent away for an ugly jacket or some other catalog trinket. A smoker might learn to blow smoke rings — or, like the guy who used to hang out in my high school parking lot, put out cigarettes on his tongue. He might buy a cigarette holder or case. But that’s about as far as cigarettes-as-identity ever got.

Vaping is a whole different story. When it comes to picking a vaporizer and the various elements that go into them, the choices are endless — and they can get amusingly technical. Wattage. Firmware. Coil material. Battery type and number. Some are carved wooden boxes; others are sleek metallic tubes like mini light sabers. Everyone seems to have a different vaping device.

“There’s a lot of innovation behind it,” says Kevin Moore, who owns local vaping chain Planet Vapor as well as East Coast Liquids, a line of e-juice manufactured at a lab in Lexington County.

However, “some people are just bored with their life” and get pretty obsessed with vaping gear, he assents.

But he thinks there’s a bigger reason people make vaping a lifestyle. The day we spoke, Moore was off to a vaping industry conference in Connecticut, planning to spend several days with the community he’s a part of.

“The people you’ll meet in the vaping industry I think is what catches people’s eyes,” he says. “It’s a tight-knit group. Everybody accepts each other.”

Vapers are an easily maligned crowd. The stereotype of the fedora-wearing, Reddit-reading vaper didn’t arise from nowhere. But Moore points out that the community is pretty diverse.

“I’ve noticed some shops will cater more to, like, kids,” Moore says. “We go for the people who want to stop smoking, not the people who blow enormous clouds. We want to get the 50-year-olds who’ve been smoking 30 years or something. We have lots of older, lots of military customers.”

And that, for regulators and consumers alike, is the big final question: Does vaping help people quit using other tobacco products? And is it safe in its own right?

The answer, on both counts, is that we don’t really know yet.

The Final Analysis

The local vaping entrepreneurs Free Times spoke with have plenty of anecdotal evidence of people using vaping to get off cigarettes. Many used to be smokers themselves. In fact, Planet Vapor’s Moore got lung cancer when he was 23 and had a portion of his lung removed, after which he switched to chewing tobacco, which had its own problems; he credits vaping with helping him quit.

On the other hand, several of the vapers we spoke with — while they may not be sucking in tar and all the other dangerous things you’ll find in a cigarette — sure do vape a lot.

Frequently — say, 15 times each during the course of a two-hour interview — Luke Moore or Wallace would pick up a small rectangular device, inhale, and blow a puff of vapor. The day we spoke, Moore went for the Berried at Sea flavor, while Wallace opted for Bavarian Cream: “one of my go-tos — it’s just a nice easy all-day vape.” Both use very low-nicotine liquids, but they say it’s hard to measure how much nicotine one is taking in, especially given the variation in devices.

For Luke Moore, though, something doesn’t have to be 100 percent healthy to be better than a cigarette.

“Anything you take into your lungs is wrong,” Moore says, holding up his vape mod. “This is not healthy. This is not good for you. But I believe — I think we have scientific evidence, and the doctors of England will agree with us — that this is healthier than smoking.”

In mentioning England, Moore is referring to a split between the American and British medical and regulatory communities when it comes to vaping.

In April, the Royal College of Physicians officially urged smokers to switch to electronic cigarettes, saying the evidence of life-saving benefits outweighs the harm.

Here in the U.S., medical and government experts are more cautious. The state of California recently launched a public campaign against vaping, saying it threatens to “renormaliz[e] smoking behavior.” And experts are particularly concerned by CDC reports showing rising vaping among middle school and high school students — though those same studies find overall tobacco use among teens holding steady since 2011, and smoking at an all-time low in 2016. Other studies have found contradictory evidence.



Tiana Drummond of Columbia at KURE’s grand opening.

“The FDA recognizes that some tobacco products have the potential to be less harmful than others — but more evidence is needed,” the FDA’s spokesperson told Free Times. However, he said the FDA just doesn’t know yet whether e-cigarettes and vaping products encourage nicotine addiction among young people or have other long-term health effects.

There’s also the question of secondhand vaping. Is it dangerous to sit near a vaper?

The research is — surprise — inconclusive. Just anecdotally, vaping’s not that unpleasant to be around — no worse than fog from a fog machine (and in fact, propylene glycol is used in fog machines). But as a longtime former smoker, being in a vape-filled room for an hour definitely gave me that old-time hopped-up-on-nicotine feeling.

Sumichrast offers up what he considers the most compelling evidence in favor of his industry.

“I have four kids —all under 18 — but if I had one of my kids come to me and say, ‘I’m 18, I’m thinking of picking up a cigarette or picking up a vape,’” Sumichrast says, “I know what my answer would be.”


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