Tobacco Company e cigarettes - to vape or not to vape?

I have recently reviewed an e cigarette made by Fontem, a subsidiary of Imperial tobacco. I have no problem with Tobacco Companies entering the e cigarette market for these reasons.

1. As a business, it would be foolish not to. We should expect it, not howl in opposition to the very same Group that we happily bought our cigarettes from during all our years of smoking.
2. In my experience vaping is a substitute for smoking - it's the 'new' smoking - it's the way to take smoking into the future. Big Tobacco already have the cigarette market, so offering e cigarettes at point of cigarette sales is logical.
3. Those who have been introduced to vaping by buying a Big Tobacco point of sale vaping device at a cigarette counter, might investigate other products on sale elsewhere once the vaping ice is broken. In fact I'd expect it. Big Tobacco products 'break the ice' into vaping.
4.  Big Tobacco has been very slow to get on top of vaping - to offer anything truly pleasing to smokers. As large lumberous companies, they cannot possibly offer the products that come and go at mercurial speed that Vape Shops and specialist places do. 
5. I see hobbyist vapers that cloud, sub ohm, build coils etc, as a subset of the group called 'vapers' in the world. I see the more humble devices to be the real backbone of vaping. Those are the ones we use at work, out shopping and travelling with. THAT'S vaping.

So I get to the place where I have to admit that most people switching from smoking to vaping, need to be steered away from using high wattage, low nic, 'specialist' devices. To my mind they are expensive. They are expensive in extra e liquid, battery power and possibly health wise. I say this because I don't know how injurious it is to my lungs to inhale such huge amounts of vapour, especially flavour in vast quantities. 

So I prefer to talk about the humble, the 'out of date' beginners stuff because I have the gut feeling the future of vaping is the solid, safe stuff. I include in that box mods and variable wattage devices, improved tanks and methods of inhalation.

I would consider 1st generation devices - the little pokey cigalike - obsolete! But even they have their place.Big Tobacco seemed to offer smokers those first, or devices with pods or pre-filled cartridges in an attempt to keep vapers in a buying loop. That was an error! Smokers aren't stupid. But BAT now offer quite decent box mods and respectable utilitarian devices and tanks. 

Big Tobacco is waking up. What do we do about that?

They could use their power to wipe out the small businesses as seems to be occuring in the USA , but my guess is that as they stumble forward into the vaping market, lots will be happening under their wings in small business versatility.

I think Big Tobacco will provide the solid, utilitarian vaping products for smokers well into the future.

A smaller company than BAT (British American Tobacco) that I supported for 50 years by smoking Rothmans and rolling my own, is Imperial Tobacco. Their subsidiary is Fontem, the makers of the Blu Pro.

I liked the Blu Pro when I reviewed it two or three years ago. It has improved. I still like it. It is what I would call a good, solid, no fuss, inexpensive utilitarian device that will provide smokers with a pleasing experience.

I reviewed six new flavours. But there are many Here 

I believe Blu are coming out with something new - a new device. Maybe it's a box mod? Who knows?

If they ask me, I'll review that too.

Big Tobacco is hated by so many vapers, and I don't know why. Tobacco Control is our real enemy.

I do not hate Big Tobacco and blame them for making me smoke, nor blame Big Alcohol for turning me into an alcoholic, or Big Food for making me fat. I think the dishonesty about smoking from Big Tobacco has just about been equalled by Tobacco Control about the harms of of SHS and now, of vaping.

Reduced nicotine cigarettes and other insanities

Here is a picture from an article by an idiot in the New York Times

Taking the Addiction Out of Smoking

This picture is supposed to show how taking the nicotine out of cigarettes will help smokers smoke LESS. (fourth image)

I kid you not!

So I am going to suggest this picture should be reversed to show what happens when you take the nicotine out of cigarettes.

Lets call the images one, two, three, four.

Number four image is the face with the least smoke around it. To my mind and from my own personal experience, image four is a picture of a person who smokes GOOD STRONG CIGARETTES!

Number one image is the smoker who has been forced by insane meddling to reduce nicotine, to smoke a product that is harming them. They are smoking more - MORE. They are obliterated by smoke.

Cigarettes with nonaddictive nicotine levels would be radically different from what used to be known as “low tar” or “light” cigarettes, marketing gimmicks now barred by law. Those cigarettes were advertised as delivering less nicotine and tar into the lungs, even though there was no actual reduction.

No - there WAS a reduction in the experience of the consumer buying the product. They were terrible things! People smoked more.

Under the F.D.A. proposal, nicotine in cigarettes would be set at a level so low that smokers would not be able to extract enough to create or sustain addiction. Cigarette makers today keep the nicotine at between 1 and 2 percent by weight, having found this to be the Goldilocks optimum, neither too harsh nor too mild. Reducing this percentage by a factor of 10 would make it very difficult for cigarettes to become addictive. Reducing it even further would make addiction virtually impossible. Kids might start smoking, but they wouldn’t have trouble quitting.

Really? What a load of bollocks!  Nicotine has already been reduced - cigarettes today are not like they used to be before they were meddled with.

The beauty of the Tobacco Control Act signed by President Barack Obama in 2009 is that while the F.D.A. is barred from requiring the removal of allnicotine from cigarettes, or from banning cigarettes altogether, the agency can set a maximum nicotine level in the interest of public health. So though the tobacco industry cannot be forced to reduce nicotine to zero, it could be required to cut the level by, say, 99 percent.

The BEAUTY? Beauty?

Come on.

If the industry is serious about what it claims to want, maybe cigarette makers should sit down with the F.D.A. and hammer out a plan to end this catastrophic and entirely preventable epidemic.

This catastrophic and entirely preventable epidemic has been made worse by Tobacco Control interfering with the product. Give smokers proper cigarettes made with proper NATURAL tobacco as it once used to be. It should have been required that cigarettes be manufactured to high standards, with the best ingredients.  THAT'S what you should have done.