Post-Mortem: Vaping Industry 2077

The sky’s replete with mauve-grey clouds. A barren wasteland laminates the endless horizon. No sign of life. The vaping industry is gone, and all the cigarette smokers have died slow, painful, agonizing deaths from cigarette-related illnesses.

Crumbling in the desert, a sign reads: “I become zealot, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence hanging by a thread, literally, on the building where the FDA once stood. Memories kept in rusty hard drives of obsequious fat cats ostentatiously licking the hands that fed them.

 

 

Despite countless premonitions from a billion-dollar market segment, the media’s perfunctory delivery of news caused the Great Collapse. Unadorned by praise, the vaping industry had saved countless lives by providing smokers with a way to replace cigarette smoking with an affordable alternative.

None of this mattered to Big Tobacco or to politicians who played pissing contests by banning products without going through the legislative process. New York fell first. Michigan followed. The dominoes continued to topple and never stopped.

 

 

E-liquid juice and flavors, which made the experience pleasant and enjoyable, kept hundreds of thousands of former smokers away from smoking a cigarette ever again. Until they banned flavors under the guise and assumption that it was being marketed to teenagers.

Instead of cutting off the head of that snake, they decided to toss an entirely different animal into the fire. They feasted on the sizzling meat and Big Tobacco reaped the rewards. Was it on purpose? Nobody truly knew.

In the dying months of 2019, the world saw the first sign of chaos thanks to illicit THC cartridges being sold by the black market and unlicensed sellers. These black-market batches proved deadly for a handful of uninitiated who simply wanted to save a few dollars.

 

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It astonishes the ghosts more in retrospect than it did even then, that the media ignored the causes and blamed the pernicious effects of bad THC batches to the vaping industry as a whole. Black market assholes also took advantage of pre-filled pods to smuggle their cheaper product, thus harmful batches reached more and more people.

But the root-cause of the epidemic was assigned elsewhere: e-cigarette flavors. With only two flavors available: tobacco and menthol, only few stuck with this method of smoking cessation, while the majority crawled back into the pits of addiction.

 

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In the unhinged atmosphere of politics lies a culture of half-baked stories and lies that eventually lead to world into ruin. The ghosts of vaper’s past rumble and groan at these memories. Vaping websites and storefronts experienced a terrible burgeoning of misinformation being scattered around the walls, like crimson streaks of innards splattered.

Without being able to defend yourself, the culprit blasted the double-barrel with yet another headline – and then another. Each one smuggling a heap of repercussions inside a “harmless” package of your regular daily news.

Maybe it was the freeing allure of corruption, or the witnessing of increasing degeneracy, we all watched as they ate our carcasses. The reaction from anti-vaping zealots sounded like roaring acclaim. Until each one of their loved ones began to experience the chronic effects of cigarette smoking.

 

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As if they were some sort of underdog hopelessly attempting to reclaim the pride and dignity of being. In retrospect, these actions didn’t pack the existential squirm that it now conjures. The plump shepherds lead the lean sheep into the slaughterhouse, and they fed richly.

The vagaries and frailties of money-driven human beings crushed the possibility of using a method of cessation for one of the most pernicious, addictive substances.

A grievance very deeply felt by those who survived becomes inescapably evident as they realize they could’ve prevented all this by acknowledging the simple distinction — vaping saved countless former smokers’ lives.

 

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Rest in peace.