Joe Dearman considers himself to still be in the health business.
With a modest but growing following at Vapor World, he’s traded barbells and treadmills for a battery, a tank, a charger and a bottle of juice — an interesting turn for someone who says he hadn’t smoked since his 20s.
“I smoked when I was in high school, riding around my Volkswagen bug,” Dearman said. “You go to a party, and someone will hand you a cigarette and it’s that peer pressure.”
A Yazoo City native, Dearman ran Delta Country gym in his hometown for 20 years before his client base dried up with the closure of the Mississippi Fertilizer plant. After selling cars for a few years, a friend in his informal network of small business owners put him on to the burgeoning business of e-cigarettes and vaping.
“We did a lot of research and said, ‘This is where it’s going, with the amount of problems with smoking,” Dearman said. “The good thing about vaping is that it’s a grassroots company. It’s not some big tobacco company with billions of dollars. It’s self-policing and we’re regulating ourselves, which means all the tobacco companies are all out looking for some smoking gun.”
Dearman manages Vapor World’s two Mississippi stores, on North Frontage Road in Vicksburg and Highway 80 East in Pearl. Laid out in jewelry store-style display cases, the product line features the metal or plastic battery-powered devices now in its third generation. They now resemble high-end cosmetics more so than a traditional cigarette, but the function is the same — a liquid nicotine solution is heated by a coiled heating element, creating a vapor that users inhale. Nicotine is delivered without the harmful chemicals, tar or odor of regular cigarettes. Some models deliver only the flavored vapor without the nicotine; others can be filled with juice containing up to 24 milligrams of nicotine, or about as much as branded heating elements advertised as “2.4 percent” in gas stations.
It’s the juice that delivers pleasant notes to the users’ palate range from high-pitched fruity notes to candy flavors. Its four components are propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, organic nicotine, and food flavoring. A typical kit with the two-piece device, charger and juice equivalent to a pack of cigarettes retails around $37. The price varies with the nicotine strength and stores usually measure savings over the long term. Also sold are so-called “VitaCigs”, which deliver a mix of vitamins and terpenes (cone-bearing plant compounds) via a stream of vapor.
“If you’re smoking a pack a day, at about $5 a pack, you’re spending $150 a month,” Dearman said. “A pack of day equals three, 10 milliliter bottles of juice. If you get three of them, that’s $18, at $6 apiece. The cost of three cartons of cigarettes at $150 drops down to $18 a month in juice.”
Analyses of long-term effects of vaping have been inconclusive, despite two components carrying the “generally recognized as safe” tag from the Food and Drug Administration. The agency has not approved the “e-liquid”, or nicotine solution, nor has the small shops in the industry been regulated in the same way as regular cigarettes in terms of legal purchasing age. In Mississippi, a few small cities have been using e-cigs in public places; no statewide age minimum has been adopted. Smokers must be 18 to purchase cigarettes lawfully.
Dearman says he cards anyone “who looks borderline” the same way convenient stores would for tobacco products.
Customers’ ages vary — from young people trying to nip a bad habit in the bud to older smokers finally ready to ease back from smoking.
“I can tell you my face and skin has gotten better since I started vaping,” said Tiffany Carroll, 19, during a visit to sample a vape kit. “I had been smoking for forever.”
“It’s a change when you first draw it in,” said a silver-haired customer who didn’t give her name. “But, I feel the difference in my chest now.”
Dearman predicts regulation should end up being a positive for the industry if applied properly and indie sellers like himself stick to reputable juice distributors whose products aren’t FDA-approved but tested anyway.
“FDA’s going to come in and regulate the level of nicotine in the vape and the age you can buy them, just like they do with cigarettes,” he said. “They’ll regulate for any impurities in the juice. And they’ll have to see if you’re doing your own juice. That’s going to cut out any mom-and-pops making it in their garage.”