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Some Henrico County vape shops’ sales have dropped significantly since the Virginia state government’s new nicotine and tobacco law came into effect in July. However, it has been highly debated whether the law is targeting the real issue at hand.
The Virginia law prohibits the “purchase or possession of tobacco products, nicotine vapor products, and alternative nicotine products by a person under 21 years of age or sale of tobacco products, nicotine vapor products, and alternative nicotine products to persons under 21 years of age,” according to the Code of Virginia.
The law took effect July 1, and vape shops immediately lost sales and customers, said Adam Sanabani, CEO of House of Vapes. House of Vapes saw an immediate 20% drop in sales across all locations, he said.
Nevertheless, Sanabani said that if all vape shops were to obey the law, the drop in sales would not be as devastating -- but not everyone is obeying.
“The biggest problem that we’re seeing right now is mostly chain tobacco stores, gas stations and convenience stores -- they don’t have practices in place,” Sanabani said. “They don’t teach their employees. We spend thousands of dollars every year to train our employees to put them through age verification training. They don’t do that; they don’t mandate that.”
Sanabani said websites like eBay and Amazon are also contributing to the problem. Without any age oversight on these sites, a person of any age could go online to buy vape products, or even purchase ingredients to make a homemade e-liquid, he said.
Nevertheless, both Sanabani and Aaron Guest, manager at Cloudz Vapor Short Pump, said that the media has been far more devastating to business than the new age restrictions.
According to Sanabani, the “vape epidemic” is completely misguided and is taking away from the success of customers who use vaping to quit smoking cigarettes, even if vaping itself is not a healthy habit.
“I genuinely truly believe I am providing a public service to the people,” Sanabani said. “And I believe that the science is there to show that vaping is a lot healthier than smoking. It is not a healthy alternative – if you don’t vape, you’re not addicted to nicotine. I always encourage people not to vape.”
Guest said Cloudz Vapor has lost many of its regular customers, but not because they are below the new age limit. Rather, the media has scared them off with stories of lung complications, he said.
“I feel like I have to defend myself because I don’t want anyone thinking I’m sitting here selling stuff to people that’s going to hurt them,” Guest said.
Unless people go into the vape stores, it’s hard to have a conversation with customers about the truth of what is going on with vaping and if it’s actually harmful, Guest said.
Guest and Sanabani said the medical issues that the media attributes to vaping are not being caused by vaping, but rather the use of illegal THC cartridges.
Using a THC cartridge in a vape device allows for users to get high without much evidence, like from large puffs of clouds or the smell of marijuana that would come from smoking regular marijuana, Sanabani said. Mixed in with the THC oils of the cartridge is vitamin E acetate, which is highly toxic and the root cause of the lipid pneumonia cases that are developing as the result of vaping, he said.
THC cartridges are illegal, and cannot be sold in legal vape shops, Sanabani said.
“We’re not allowed to sell that,” Guest said. “So I don’t know how we could do anything differently here to keep that from happening when we’re not selling those products.”
With the health problems coming to light, people want someone to blame, and the easiest target is the local vape shop, Guest said. With massive drops in sales that many vape shops have seen, Guest said he thought shops would soon disappear. Then, people who want vape or nicotine products will have to go to gas stations and convenience stores, he said.
“We’re all salaried employees – this is not our part-time job,” Guest said. “This is my job; it’s my full-time job.”
Vaping smoke ‘doesn’t just go away’
Slade Gormus, a registered nurse and employee at the University of Richmond Student Health Center, has a completely different outlook on Sanabani and Guest’s arguments that vapes are safe and the ban is not effective in helping to end this vape epidemic.
“We know for a fact that tobacco products cause cancer – they cause lung injury, they cause cardiovascular problems, strokes; we know that,” Gormus said.
Although THC cartridges are a source of medical issues that are arising, Gormus disagreed that vaping nicotine, whether from a vape or from a Juul, is also a serious source of harm.
“The problem comes with the product that is released from that vape or from that Juul,” Gormus said. “When you blow out that big, huge plume of smoke, it doesn’t just go away. I can inhale it, you can inhale it, it stays on surfaces; we know that it stays in cars for 40 minutes after you’ve left the vehicle.”
The puffs of smoke that are blown out after inhaling the vape product are still harmful, in a similar way to the secondhand smoke of a cigarette, Gormus said. This smoke inhaled or blown out, or the residue that the smoke leaves on various surfaces, all contains carcinogens, she said.
“Whatever that person is inhaling from that e-juice, when they exhale it, if I’m standing next to them, I am also inhaling it,” she said. “And anybody who thinks that’s not a harmful thing is wrong.”
A common argument in support of vaping is the success rate it has for aiding people who want to quit smoking cigarettes. Sanabani, a former smoker himself, said he has seen many success stories of people who were able to quit smoking because they switched over to the vape.
Guest similarly had smoked cigarettes before getting a vape and said it improved his quality of life.
“I’ve helped a lot of people get off cigarettes, including myself,” Guest said. “I’ve been off cigarettes for four years now, and it’s a really good feeling. I don’t feel like my lungs are going to collapse.”
Gormus disagreed with the concept that vaping is a good alternative to smoking or should be the method people use to quit smoking. Instead, she recommended that nicotine addicts try to quit by using the patch, medications and gum – but never a vape or a Juul, which also are not recommended by FDA standards.
In response to arguments that vaping products are being wrongfully criticized as harmful, Gormus said that those in the science and medical fields are still learning and studying vaping and its effects on people.
“When we get health updates from the health department about these lung cases that are going around, all we can say is don’t use these products until we can figure out what is going on,” Gormus said. “But we know something is going on, and we know that the common link between all of them is vaping.”
