The E-Cigarette Industry, Waiting to Exhale

MATT RICHTEL
October 26, 2013

A look inside an NJOY e-cigarette, which packs a small computer chip, a lithium-ion battery and a wick wrapped in cotton soaked in nicotine and a carrier liquid.

His was an electronic cigarette, a look-alike that delivers nicotine without combusting tobacco and produces a vapor, not smoke. Mr. Vuleta, 51, who has a sardonic humor, clearly relished recounting this story. He is the chief marketing officer for NJOY, an electronic cigarette company based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and it is his job to reframe how everyone, nonsmokers included, view the habit of inhaling from a thin stick and blowing out a visible cloud.

Mr. Vuleta, who told his tale in the office of Craig Weiss, the NJOY chief executive, calls this a process of “renormalizing,” so that smokers can come back in from the cold. He means that literally — allowing people now exiled to the sidewalks back into buildings with e-cigarettes. But he also means it metaphorically. Early in the last century, smoking was an accepted alternative for men to chewing tobacco; for women, it was daring and transgressive. Then, in midcentury, it became the norm. As the dangers of tobacco — and the scandalous behavior of tobacco companies in concealing those dangers — became impossible to ignore, smoking took on a new identity: societal evil.

Mr. Vuleta and Mr. Weiss want to make “vaping,” as e-cigarette smoking is known in the industry, acceptable. Keith Richards might still be smoking tobacco, but in Mr. Vuleta’s vision, that grizzled guitarist’s gesture could inspire the audience, en masse, to pull out e-cigarettes. “The moment Keith Richards does it,” he said, “everyone else does, too.”

Mr. Vuleta’s words are more exuberant than the official company line, which is that NJOY doesn’t want everyone to smoke e-cigarettes but only to convert the 40 million Americans who now smoke tobacco. The customers NJOY attracts, and how it attracts them, are at the center of a new public health debate, not to mention a rush to control the e-cigarette business.

At stake is a vaping market that has grown in a few short years to around $1.7 billion in sales in the United States. That is tiny when compared to the nation’s $90 billion cigarette market. But one particularly bullish Wall Street analyst projects that consumption of e-cigarettes will outstrip regular ones in the next decade.

NJOY was one of the first companies to sell e-cigarettes; now there are 200 in the United States, most of them small. Just last year, however, Big Tobacco got into the game when Lorillard acquired Blu, an e-cigarette brand, and demonstrated its economic power. Within months, relying on Lorillard’s decades-old distribution channels, Blu displaced NJOY as the market leader.

Mr. Weiss still sees NJOY as having an advantage — in building e-cigarettes that look, feel and perform like the real thing. It’s a different strategy than that of competing products that look like long silver tubes or sleek, blinking fountain pens.

“We’re trying to do something very challenging: change a habit that is not only entrenched but one people are willing to take to their grave,” said Mr. Weiss, who is not a smoker but has tried both regular and e-cigarettes. “To accomplish that, we have to narrow as much as possible the bridge to familiarity. We have to make it easy for smokers to cross it.”

To some, though not all, in public health, that vision sounds ill-conceived, if not threatening. Among their concerns is that making smoking-like behavior O.K. again will undo decades of work demonizing smoking itself. Far from leading to more smoking cessation, they argue, e-cigarettes will ultimately revive it, and abet new cases of emphysema, heart disease and lung cancer.

“The very thing that could make them effective is also their greatest danger,” said Dr. Tim McAfee, director of Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To achieve his ends, Mr. Weiss is building a company of strange bedfellows. He has hired former top tobacco industry executives, but also attracted a former surgeon general, Dr. Richard H. Carmona, who has joined the board. NJOY recently hired away a prominent professor of chemistry and genomics from Princeton to be the company’s chief scientist. The company has attracted investment from Sean Parker, the former Facebook president, and Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder. There has also been a celebrity endorsement from the singer Bruno Mars.

Mr. Weiss sees his company as doing something epic. Not long after he was named its president in June 2010, he asked his psychologist if he might record his regular sessions. It was an unusual request, but he thinks that recording his thoughts might ultimately help him write a book or movie script about how he and the company made the cigarette obsolete.

“We’re at this incredible inflection point in history,” he said, adding that the company has a chance to “make the single most beneficial impact on society in this century.”

Over dinner at Federal Pizza, a trendy place in Phoenix owned by a close friend, Mr. Weiss put a Camel Crush cigarette onto a table beside an NJOY King. “These are almost identical,” he says, “but we still have a ways to go.”
The two sticks on the table were roughly the same size. But NJOY’s weighs around 5 grams, more than twice as much as the Camel. When squeezed, the NJOY isn’t as spongy, and it lacks the Camel’s fragrance (though a nimbus of tobacco bouquet emerges when you open the pack). The tip is plastic with an LED glow, not real fire, and it produces no ash.

These distinctions can mean everything to heavy smokers for whom each detail in the smoking ritual — a “moment in the day,” as Mr. Vuleta summarizes the experience of each cigarette — adds up to something exquisite.

“Smokers talk about a ‘throat hit,’ ” Mr. Weiss explained as he sipped a strawberry wine cooler over pizza, referring to a tickle or slight burn at the back of the throat, a part of the overall Pavlovian experience that comes before the nicotine rush. It’s something, he said, that the company’s products are becoming better at imitating, along with changing the chemistry inside the e-cigarette so that nicotine is absorbed more quickly by the body, more like the real thing. But it is not there yet.

The NJOY King, which sells for $7.99, is disposable and tries to deliver as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes; other kinds of e-cigarettes are rechargeable, their nicotine fluid refills costing around $3 or $4.
If the NJOY and a regular cigarette look similar on the outside, the inside is another story. Inside the e-cigarette’s polycarbonate tube casing is an integrated circuit, a small computer chip. Then comes a lithium-ion battery and a wick wrapped in cotton soaked in a mixture of nicotine and a carrier liquid of glycerol and propylene glycol. The battery is turned on when the user drags on the stick, heating the gadget’s inside to around 180 degrees and turning the nicotine into vapor. When inhaled, it leaves the throat with an “ambient feel,” Mr. Weiss calls it — a caress, not the desired throat hit.

Not all e-cigarette companies embrace experiential authenticity the way NJOY does, and some make a deliberate effort at difference. NJOY executives like to mock the more exotic efforts. “An e-cigarette that doesn’t look like a cigarette, but looks like a silver tube with a white light at the end, is anything but an exquisite experience,” said Roy Anise, NJOY’s executive vice president in charge of sales, who came to the company from Philip Morris, the tobacco company whose parent is Altria. Mr. Anise worked in the tobacco industry for 24 years, eventually in the division that sold smokeless products.

Blu eCigs, NJOY’s biggest competition, are slender black tubes, with tips that glow blue, not ember-red. Murray S. Kessler, the C.E.O. of Lorillard, which sells Blu, described the look as “edgy” and “cool” and said that, with such a look, there is a better chance to make it a “complete replacement” to the cigarette. “I don’t want to emulate a cigarette,” Mr. Kessler said. “The big idea isn’t to try to keep people in cigarettes, but to normalize smoking e-cigarettes and vaping as the next generation.”

E-cigarettes that look different, he said, could “solve the social stigma issue” and erase the tension of smoking in public places.

Doesn’t that cannibalize his tobacco business? Yes, he said, it might, but he added that his shareholders “don’t care whether we sell cigarettes or e-cigarettes” so long as the company maintains profits. Right now, though, real cigarettes are much more profitable, as Mr. Kessler conceded, but he said he thought that e-cigarette profit margins could grow.

Bonnie Herzog, a tobacco industry analyst at Wells Fargo who is particularly bullish on e-cigarettes, said that there was room for different e-cigarette styles. But tobacco companies have a decided edge over small companies like NJOY, she said, because of their entrenched distribution, deep pockets and databases of contact information for millions of customers.

Her assertion seems to be borne out by the success of Blu. Since being acquired by Lorillard, Blu has a convenience-store market share that has climbed to 39 percent from 12 percent in a little more than a year, while NJOY’s has fallen to 30 percent from 48 percent. (NJOY expects its revenue to triple over this year to more than $100 million; Mr. Weiss declined to be more specific about sales.)

Lorillard is pushing hard, saying it will spend $40 million this year on marketing — a budget that amounts to 35 percent of the $114 million in Blu sales in the first half of the year.

Two other big tobacco companies are exploring the market. The MarkTen, from Altria, can be recharged; it is being sold in Indiana in a test. The Vuse, from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, is a long, silver model that is being tried in Colorado.

If those large companies decide to go full force into the market, they could further erode NJOY’s market share, adding a business reason for Mr. Weiss to vilify the tobacco giants. One selling point of NJOY may be its likeness to real cigarettes, but another could be that it was never a tobacco company. He has brought on Mr. Anise and others with tobacco experience, he said, because success depends on relationships with convenience stores that sell cigarettes. But, unlike Mr. Kessler, Mr. Weiss can still rail against the companies that “kill half their customers.”

Mr. Weiss, who turned 40 in July, didn’t come to NJOY as a public health advocate or even as someone whose life was touched by the hazards of smoking. “I have no personal ‘my dad died of lung cancer’ type of story,’ ” he said. Rather, his zeal seems to be equal parts outrage and inborn entrepreneurial excitation. He obtained the first of his three patents at age 15 — it was for a net to catch tennis balls — and went on to become a lawyer before starting a hedge fund.

NJOY was started by Mr. Weiss’s brother, Mark Weiss, a lawyer in Scottsdale, who was inspired by a crude version of an electronic cigar at a trade show in China in 2005. In 2009, the company faced a near-death experience when a shipment from China, where the NJOY cigarettes are made, was seized at the port of Long Beach, Calif. The Food and Drug Administration charged that the e-cigarettes were an unapproved drug-delivery device.

NJOY initially argued that it had made no health claims and therefore shouldn’t be regulated. But just months after the seizure, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was passed. It gave the F.D.A. the power to regulate tobacco products, but not to ban them. (At the time, Craig Weiss was a shareholder but not part of management; he did weigh in on legal matters.) After the change in federal law, NJOY updated its legal position, arguing that nicotine is derived from tobacco, and therefore that the F.D.A. had the power to regulate e-cigarettes under the new law. In a 2010 ruling, a federal district court in Washington accepted that argument, preventing an outright ban of NJOY’s product as an unregulated drug delivery device and punting the specifics of how the products should be regulated over to the F.D.A.

The F.D.A. has said it plans to issue preliminary rules for public comment on e-cigarette regulations as soon as the end of this month, but the partial government shutdown appears to have delayed that process. Earlier this month, the European Parliament endorsed limits on sponsorship and advertising of e-cigarettes, and on their sale to minors, but scrapped tougher regulations favored by some in public health that would have regulated them as tightly as medical devices.

Some critics say NJOY and other e-cigarette companies are trying to have it both ways. “When it’s convenient to be like tobacco, they’re like tobacco,” says Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, “and when it’s not convenient, they’re not.”
One day in mid-August, Dr. McAfee, the tobacco expert from the C.D.C., received an e-mail with statistics about e-cigarette use among young people. The statistics compared e-cigarette experimentation in 2012 with that of 2011, the first year the C.D.C. had collected data on the phenomenon.

Alarm bells went off the instant Dr. McAfee saw the numbers: among students in grades 6 to 12, experimentation with e-cigarettes had doubled, to 6.8 percent from 3.3 percent. Not surprisingly, the numbers were higher among high school students, 10 percent of whom reported trying an e-cigarette, more than double the share in 2011.

Within hours, Dr. McAfee called Mitch Zeller, the director of the Center for Tobacco Products of the F.D.A. As Dr. McAfee recounted his conversation, he told Mr. Zeller: “This is not business as usual.”

One of the strongest predictors of whether someone becomes a lifelong smoker is how early he or she starts experimenting, and Dr. McAfee saw experimentation with e-cigarettes as a gateway to tobacco. Three weeks later, the C.D.C. issued an “emergency note from the field,” a communication typically reserved for acute disease outbreaks.
From a public health perspective, e-cigarettes raise two questions: How harmful are they? And, regardless, will they lead to smoking cessation or, perversely, reinforce the tobacco smoking habit?

Most public health officials seem to agree that the levels of toxins in e-cigarettes are far lower than those in traditional cigarettes. But they also say that far too little is known, not just about potentially harmful aspects of particular brands of e-cigarettes, but also about whether there is harm from “secondhand vapor.” Dr. Glantz of U.C.S.F. says that in the absence of data, indoor smoking bans should also cover e-cigarettes.

Mr. Weiss asserted that such indoor bans would eliminate a competitive advantage for e-cigarettes and thus harm the effort to normalize this alternative behavior. More broadly, he said, public policy should err on the side of giving e-cigarettes a chance, even if everything about the health effects isn’t known. “This idea of saying we don’t have data — that ‘in the absence of data we’re going to act’ — is potentially condemning people to a painful and early death,” he said. Public health officials who want more research before accepting vaping, he said, are “suffering from P.T.S.D. from the lies they were told by tobacco companies.”

The public health officials don’t disagree; in fact, they say they blew it with cigarettes by ignoring warning signs, waiting years to mount ironclad scientific proof and thus allowing a deadly habit to take hold. They are trying to learn from the past. “We can’t allow e-cigarettes to establish themselves the way cigarettes did and, five years from now when all the scientific questions are answered, try to stuff the genie back in the bottle,” said Dr. Glantz, who advocates tighter regulation.

Another area of sharp disagreement is the question of whether e-cigarettes really help people quit smoking. Given that electronic cigarettes aren’t considered as satisfying a nicotine rush, skeptics worry further that if the e-cigarette takes hold, it will lead people to using the tobacco version.

There is no data to validate that concern, just as there is little data on cessation. Surveys suggest that e-cigarette users are quitting or cutting down on cigarettes. But one scientific study, published in September in The Lancet, a British medical journal, found that six months into smoking e-cigarettes, 7.3 percent of users had quit smoking tobacco. That was the statistical equivalent to the modestly effective patch (a quit rate of 5.8 percent).

“We were hoping for the magic bullet,” said Natalie Walker, director of addiction research at the National Institute for Health Innovation in New Zealand, and one of the study’s authors. “We were surprised by the low quit rate.” Still, she says she thinks e-cigarettes have potential as “another tool” and notes that they have a crucial advantage over other nicotine replacement strategies: “E-cigs have a large and dedicated fan club.”

Dr. Carmona, the former surgeon general who has joined NJOY’s board, is not willing to accept defeat. As surgeon general, he emphasized the dangers of secondhand smoke, and e-cigarettes seem to him the best bet for a cessation device. “We don’t have all the answers” he said, “but we see there is potential for this to be a very disruptive force in cessation.”

Mr. Weiss favors regulation that would require companies to disclose ingredients, set manufacturing standards and prohibit sales to minors, but he objects to restrictions on marketing. At the moment, absent F.D.A. regulations, e-cigarette companies, unlike tobacco companies, can sponsor sports and entertainment events, or advertise on television.

What they can’t do is make health claims; if they did, they would face regulation as a drug company. So the ads tend to be implicit, as in one that ran during the Super Bowl last year. In it, a handsome man smoked an NJOY with a voice-over that said: “You know what the most amazing thing about this cigarette is? It isn’t one,” and then continued, “The first electronic cigarette with the look, feel and flavor of the real thing.”

Reynolds, the maker of Vuse, has a commercial that sounds much like old TV ads for cigarettes, promising “a perfect puff, first time, every time.” A commercial for Blu features Jenny McCarthy complaining she doesn’t like a kiss “that tastes like an ashtray.”

Mr. Weiss said NJoy’s Super Bowl ad prompted a 40 percent uptick in sales in the five markets where it ran. That kind of impact is why he doesn’t want the F.D.A. to forbid television advertising. “Any ad restrictions that limit our ability to let smokers know they have an alternative only serves the interest of Big Tobacco,” he said, because tobacco companies have such an edge on the traditional channels of distribution. He does agree, however, that there should be no advertising during children’s TV shows. He declined to say how much the company spends on marketing.
The push for regulation is coming from many quarters, including a majority of the state attorneys general. Forty of them wrote a letter in September to the F.D.A., seeking “immediate regulatory oversight of e-cigarettes, an increasingly widespread, addictive product.” The letter said that the nicotine in e-cigarettes “has immediate biochemical effects on the brain and body at any dosage, and is toxic in high doses.”

Then, last week, the group sent a second letter reiterating its position, urging rules that would “ensure that companies do not continue to sell or advertise to our nation’s youth.”

In the first letter, the state attorneys general singled out NJOY’s Super Bowl ad, not in its appeal to youth but the way it looked just like the thing it seeks to replace: “The advertisement depicted an attractive man smoking an e-cigarette that looked just like a real cigarette.”

Mr. Weiss doesn’t see a problem with this. “We want it to look exactly like a cigarette because that’s how we’re going to get smokers to change behavior,” he said. For decades, he noted, there have been smoking alternatives, like patches and pills and gum, that were nothing like cigarettes. Going down that road, he said, is “Einstein’s definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

At the same time, he conceded that his strategy “creates some confusion” that “is not irrational to me, and just requires education.”

“People say, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.”

Mr. Weiss’s challenge, if he’s to reach what he envisions as a place in history, will be to prove that looks can be deceiving.