The inventor of vaping

My Spectator article on meeting the man who
invented vaping, Hon Lik.

 

Few people have heard of Hon Lik, which is a pity because he’s
probably saved more lives already than anybody else I have met.
Twelve years ago, he invented vaping — the idea of getting nicotine
vapour from an electronic device rather than a miniature bonfire
between your lips. Vaping is driving smoking out at an
extraordinary rate, promising to achieve what decades of public
health measures have largely failed to do. And it is doing so
without official encouragement, indeed with some official
resistance.

Via an interpreter, and sucking on an electronic pipe, Mr Hon
told me how it happened. And here is the key point, the one that
panjandrums of public health still seem to miss. He invented vaping
in order to stop smoking, and that’s what it’s used for today.

He says he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day while
working as a chemist at the Liaoning Provincial Institute of
Traditional Chinese Medicine. He thought: ‘How can I quit?’ He
tried cold turkey several times and failed. In 2001 he tried a
nicotine patch but it gave him nightmares when he forgot to take it
off at night, and it failed to replicate the initial rush of a
cigarette.

Being a chemist with a penchant for electronics, he went into
the laboratory and set about emulating the effect of smoke without
a fire. The lab where he worked had a good supply of pure nicotine,
used for calibrating other products. He needed to find a way to
vaporise it instantly, and began with ultrasound, later turning to
a heating element.

His first machine was a monster. By 2003 he had filed a patent
on a smaller, more practical model. ‘I already knew it would be a
revolutionary product,’ he told me with a smile. ‘Some in China
have called it the fifth invention — after navigation, gunpowder,
printing and paper,’ he laughs. ‘But that’s too much.’

He went to work on miniaturising the device further, and
refining the mechanism for vaporising nicotine in response to a
puff. Why did he do it, I asked. ‘To solve a social problem,’ he
replied. ‘Quitting is suffering.’

After eight months of toxicology testing by the Pharmaceutical
Authority in Liaoning and by the Chinese military’s medical
institute, the product went on sale. There was modest interest in
China, but it was only when firms began selling versions in Europe
and North America, about eight years ago, that the vaping
revolution took off.

Today more than a million smokers in Britain have quit by using
e-cigarettes, and at least another million have cut down. The
number is growing all the time, and it’s now easily the most
popular method of quitting tobacco. That means a lot less lung
cancer, heart disease, stinky clothing and fire risk. What’s more,
none of these people had to get a prescription, or be subsidised by
the taxpayer or treated by the NHS, as with other methods of
quitting such as patches, gum, psychiatry or acupuncture. It’s a
purely voluntary, private-sector solution.

You would think the public health authorities would be shouting
this from the rooftops, but the Welsh government is trying to ban
the use of e-cigarettes in enclosed public spaces, the British
Medical Association remains implacably disapproving, the World
Health Organisation censorious, and the European Commission set on
banning refillable versions. Southern Rail is banning vaping on its
trains from next month, and Starbucks, Caffè Nero, All Bar One, and
KFC also have bans.

The opponents fear that vaping is a gateway into smoking, when
all the evidence suggests it’s a floodgate out. The number of
‘never smokers’ who vape remains negligible. I am genuinely baffled
by how hard it is to get medics to understand the concept of harm
reduction: that if people are doing something harmful but hard to
give up, you should encourage them to switch to something much less
harmful that satisfies their urges. They talk of vaping as
‘renormalising smoking’, which makes about as much sense as saying
coffee-drinking renormalises whisky-drinking. It’s denormalising
smoking.

There is a hint that these die-hard prohibitionists are losing
allies, though. The anti-smoking group Ash, the British Heart
Foundation, the Royal College of Physicians and even Cancer
Research UK have come out against the Welsh ban, and effectively in
favour of letting vaping drive out smoking. The penny is
dropping.

Perhaps we should do a controlled experiment. Divide the country
in two. In one part — let’s call it Wales — we regulate
e-cigarettes as medicines, ban their use in enclosed public places,
restrict advertising, ban the sale of refillable versions, and ban
the sale of e-cigarettes stronger than 20 milligrams per
millilitre. All these measures have been urged or are in the
pipeline.

In the other part, England, we leave them as consumer products,
regulated as such, let them be advertised as glamorous, let them be
used on trains and in pubs, allow the sale of refills, allow the
sale of flavoured ones, and allow stronger products. We encourage
their use: the Health Secretary even goes on television to urge
smokers to try them. In which country would the death rate fall
fastest?

Given that there is no evidence that vaping is harmful, that the
toxic contents of vapour are far, far fewer and less abundant than
those of smoke, and that most experts think vaping is a thousand
times safer than smoking, it is a racing certainty that England
would see the better outcome.

Mr Hon now works for Fontem Ventures, a Dutch-based subsidiary
of Imperial Tobacco. (He says he is at last looking forward to
making some serious money from his invention.) The fact that the
tobacco industry has bought up many of the small firms that
dominated the vaping industry in its first decade makes doctors
highly suspicious.

They have hated Big Tobacco for so long that they cannot bring
themselves to believe it might abandon the weed. Their conspiracy
theory is that the tobacco industry is getting hold of this
technology so it can win back society’s support for something that
at least looks like smoking and then — bang! — at the appropriate
moment announce that smoking has become acceptable again. Or
something. It’s that illogical.

Isn’t it much more likely that tobacco executives looked across
at vaping firms a few years ago and realised that if they didn’t
join them they would be beaten by them? It would be their Kodak
moment — like when the huge film firm failed to adapt to the
digital photography revolution and died. It is surely great news if
the tobacco industry turns itself into a nicotine-vapour industry
instead and stops killing people.

 

Post-script. The first comments below the article were
interesting:

I had my first cigarette when I was 10 yrs old. At fifteen
and having left school

and working as an engineering apprentice, I was on 10 a day. By
the

time I married at 26, I was on 40 a day. It stayed that way
for

another 33 yrs with countless failed attempts to quit. Then, in
June

2013, I tried my first e-cig. I've never smoked a proper
cigarette

since. After a year of vaping and gradually reducing the
nicotine

strength, I stopped altogether in July 2014. It was so easy I
still

can't believe it. I don't have any cravings at all. I will
never

smoke again. And it's all thanks to vaping.

another one:

Similar history of smoking...began around 12 and other than a
2weeks abatement in my early20s,continued for 55years..a brain
aneurysm was discovered in January this year and I immediately went
on e-igs...early days I know but 5months without a real roll-up
represents a massive change for me..ok the thought of sudden death
IS a factor...nevertheless(and my fingers are permanently crossed
on this) a day at a time on ecigs has added up.

The Welsh health police really need to just mind their own
business on this..that goes for the other begrudgers..

and the third:

This man should get the Nobel Prize for Science. I have seen so
many smokers switch to ecigs and it made a huge difference in their
lives. Their health improves because they are no longer sucking in
all that smoke and ash. The drive to ban them is totally
insane.