E-cigarettes

Introduction

While negotiating access to the field, my neighborhood e-shop vendor mentions offhandedly that he takes part in “Vapéros.” That he takes part in what? He is incredulous. Haven’t I looked up the city’s online “Vaping community” yet? I rush to my laptop. I find the “community” spread over several online spaces, namely, social networks and forums via which web users can schedule informal meetings. On a forum page titled “Vapo’days,” I follow a link to sign up to the next monthly “Vapéro.” I learn online that this neologism describes a group meeting condensing the words “vape” and “apéritif.”

The following Friday night, I join the members at a pizzeria at a long table shrouded in thick vapor. I am given a sticky name label and seated at the far end of the table. The “vapoteurs” (electronic-cigarette [e-cigarette] users) nearest me wear labels showing their forum pseudonyms and are busy discussing where to purchase cotton wool. Thierry, a 24-year-old on my right, takes me under his wing. He shows me how to insert the cotton into the resistance coil of an e-cigarette with tweezers and dab it with e-liquid. He holds up a tuft of beige fluff. “The best is to get organic cotton, the least processed type. The nearest thing to a plant.” Veronique, a 40-year-old woman sitting opposite, raises her voice. “For a start they use lots of products to whiten [the cotton]. You have to get the most natural stuff possible. That’s what going into your lungs after all!”

Although the World Health Organization (WHO) and the French Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament (National Agency for Safety of Medicine and Health Products) have denied e-cigarettes the status of pharmaceutical substitution products, many French citizens have decided to purchase these battery-operated devices that deliver nicotine via an inhaled vapor—a working principle that has raised great controversy. While nicotine replacement therapies such as patches and gum are designed as discrete, medical treatments, e-cigarette technology openly imitates smoking behavior and leaves space for social bonding and pleasure, thus raising ideological challenges for public health organizations. Since their commercialization and intense media coverage in 2013, they have gained widespread popularity as French consumers decide for themselves what e-cigarettes are or could be in their everyday lives. User-based associations such as the Association Indépendante des Utilisateurs de la Cigarette Électronique (Independent Association for Electronic Cigarette Users) have rapidly cropped up to defend consumers’ rights, and vaping “communities” have blossomed online and across France’s largest cities.

Social scientists have built a large corpus of knowledge on the subject of smoking. Authors have highlighted that smoking practices can be central to the consolidation of ethnic and group identities (Nichter, 2003), be a form of social capital enabling transition into adulthood for young women (Haines, Poland, & Johnson, 2009), act as a valuable object of exchange (Reed, 2007), or participate in the stigmatization and spatial segregation of socioeconomically disadvantaged populations (Thompson, Pearce, & Barnett, 2007). Nevertheless, most analyses conceive of smoking as a practice in the singular, overlooking the many ways in which users personalize cigarette smoking.

Social scientists’ analyses of smoking also inadvertently overlook the fact that combustion cigarettes are enjoyable to consume (e.g., Layte & Whelan, 2009; Nichter, 2003; Poland et al., 2006). Scholars have recently drawn attention to the importance of recognizing pleasure in relation to substance use (Duff, 2008; Race, 2008). This article brings pleasure to the forefront of analysis, addressing smoking and vaping as sensory social practices. I argue that alongside these previously recognized dimensions of smoking, pleasure is a crucial factor to consider when examining contemporary practices surrounding cigarettes and e-cigarettes in France.

This paper first examines the competing discourses surrounding e-cigarettes in France and asks whether young smokers engage in activities to lessen drug-related harm. It then analyzes the self-management of nicotine, gustatory pleasure, and social bonding that take place around these devices. I conclude that e-cigarettes have emerged as a highly valued form of substitution precisely because of their versatility—providing occasions for social bonding, refined tasting, and the non-medicalized management of health with myriad possibilities for individualized tailoring.

Method

Data were collected using mixed methods, including participant observation, 15 semistructured interviews of 1–2 hr with smokers and e-cigarette users, visual methods, and virtual ethnography. Participants aged 18–26 were recruited from bars, cafés, restaurants, e-cigarette shops, and on the street in a city in France. As virtual e-cigarette communities are relatively small, I have chosen to anonymize the city and region to protect participants’ identity. Research advanced by snowball sampling, meeting, and interviewing participants’ acquaintances.

Interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed. The aim of these interviews was to discover what cigarettes and e-cigarettes meant and did for informants. During the interviews, informants were asked about their smoking history. How, when, and with whom did they start smoking and/or vaping, and how did this then become an everyday practice? Informants were asked what substance(s) they smoked/vaped, in which situations, how often, where, and with whom, in order to discover how these products were embedded in their day-to-day lives.

In order to generate reflexivity and coproduce knowledge with informants, I asked youths to imagine that the interviewer did not know what cigarettes and e-cigarettes were and that they had to describe how these devices worked in detail. Interlocutors were told they were allowed to smoke or vape during the interview and were encouraged to give accurate descriptions of the sensations they felt during this instance of cigarette or e-cigarette use. It often proved difficult for informants to talk about objects so steeped in ordinariness, and youths often brought up the topic of the harms of tobacco use to health on their own accord. This problem was resolved by asking participants to compare e-cigarettes and combustion cigarettes (and in some occasions marijuana), which sparked detailed and precise accounts of what cigarettes or e-cigarettes (or marijuana) were not. This comparative method was used throughout fieldwork, as it shed analytical light on both objects, respectively, and helped to understand how youths conceived of substitution and harm reduction.

Knowledge on smoking pleasure also emerged from data collected via visual methods. One method consisted in approaching unknown persons smoking outdoors. After explaining I was interested in smoking sensations, I handed them a pen and paper and asked them to draw “what happens, what you feel, or what you imagine goes on in your body when you smoke.” I also asked informants to conduct “photo recalls,” using mobile phones to photograph the different cigarettes they smoked over a day or several days. While all smokers happily agreed to do this, only two sent me a series of photographs. These showed moments like drinking beer with friends, eating breakfast, watching television, or studying, revealing the diversity of situations in which cigarettes are smoked. In order to gain more distance on what cigarettes and e-cigarettes were, I also traced the social lives of these and other related objects (e.g., lighters, ashtrays, e-liquid bottles), photographing them to understand their places in informants’ lives.

I conducted participant observation from January to August 2014 in two e-cigarette shops, a restaurant, and open events organized by e-cigarette “communities” in two different cities. E-cigarette staff allowed me to observe interactions and talk to customers and staff behind the counter in Shop A. I could also access the stock room to see how products were managed. In Shop B, a more relaxed atmosphere, I conducted observation in the main sales area where customers often stayed for longer, often talking to the shop owner informally. Customers were informed of my study and encouraged to explain what they had come for, what their regular purchases were, their choice of e-cigarette shop(s), and relationship with e-cigarettes more generally. I also conducted observation in a restaurant in which I worked part-time, with consent from the owner and staff. I observed kitchen workers’, waiters’, managers’, and customers’ use of cigarettes and e-cigarettes during their work shifts or meals and interviewed members of staff. I also attended open social events organized by two e-cigarette communities. These were held in restaurants, bars, or in the park. I also observed discussions posted on an open French forum that can be accessed without restriction to membership.

The e-cigarette users I encountered during fieldwork had all been (or still were) smokers save one exception. My life at home with my French partner, who had just started using e-cigarettes at the time, was also a valuable source of inspiration for this research. Written or oral consent was obtained from participants in the field. All names for interviewees and places are pseudonyms. Quotations are translated from French.

The research presented in this article is part of and supported by the European Advanced Grant ChemicalYouth (ERC-AdG-323646), which is led by Professor Anita Hardon of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research and has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (Approval April 12, 2012).

Competing Discourses on E-cigarettes

Harm reduction has come to form a “central plank in drug policy and practice worldwide” (Moore & Fraser, 2006, p. 3036). While harm reduction approaches depict risk as a continuum and aim to lessen (rather than eliminate) exposure to harm, state tobacco control policies are currently dominated by an abstinence-based framework (Eversman, 2015). The latter approach corresponds with a pathological gaze on smoking that has been progressively normalized since the 1990s. Since public health bodies such as the WHO requalified tobacco addiction as a disease, references to the “tobacco epidemic” have become commonplace (Bell, McNaughton, & Salmon, 2011).

Current regulations and public health campaigns are correlated with historical turning points in medical research. In determining elevated risks of cardiovascular disease and mortality, the focus of research has notably shifted from the quantity of cigarettes smoked daily to the duration of smoking in an individual’s life (Grana, Benowitz, Glantz, 2014). In this light, public health policies do not envision user practices such as reduced consumption, “light” smoking, or “dual use” (combined use of electronic and combustion cigarettes) as tolerable options. No space is provided for shades of gray since the French public health council acknowledges that “There is no threshold under which smoking is without risk” (Haute Autorité de Santé [HAS], 2014).

E-cigarettes are a growing market with huge potential, and France is the world’s second largest. Much of the current tension surrounding e-cigarette regulations and status resides in the fact that transnational tobacco companies such as Altria, Reynolds, Imperial Tobacco, and British American Tobacco (BAT) have absorbed major e-cigarette companies or marketed their own brands, thus placing e-cigarettes at the heart of power relationships and clashes of interest. Consumer-led efforts to influence regulations and policies such as online petitions can often be traced back to cigarette or e-cigarette companies themselves (De Andrade, Hastings, & Angus, 2013).

E-cigarettes are not straightforward products. Peeters and Gilmore recently analyzed how tobacco companies have embraced these new objects and use harm reduction discourses in what they condemn as “an opportunistic tactical adaptation to policy change” (2015, p. 182). Indeed, companies such as BAT and Philip Morris have publicly expressed their desire to become active “partners” in tobacco harm reduction research and policy making. BAT’s harm reduction website (www.bat.com/harmreduction) promotes the company’s vocation to “offer less risky alternatives to regular cigarettes for those smokers who cannot, or choose not to, give up.” This approach openly establishes e-cigarettes as a permanent replacement product rather than a temporary means of smoking cessation—a direction antonymous with current public health positions. Moreover, tobacco companies are simultaneously obtaining U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to expand their lines with new combustion cigarette products, thus enabling them to have it both ways (Grana et al., 2014). Some businesses (e.g., Lite-Up) have even attempted to promote dual use in order to secure the tobacco industry’s future (De Andrade et al., 2013).

E-cigarette promotion material employs a wide lexicon ranging from safer, healthier, cleaner, and money saving to high tech, fashionable, tasty, fun, and sexy. Glamorous French actresses such as Mélanie Laurent, Julie Depardieu, and Catherine Deneuve have made ostentatious media appearances with these products. In the wake of debate on the carcinogenic substances allegedly contained in e-cigarettes and the Institut national de la consommation (French Institute for Consumption) calling for norms on product quality, e-cigarette advertising has turned toward creating images of product legitimacy. Major companies such as e-liquide.fr focus on the transparency, traceability, and reliability of their products, boasting compliance with the strictest norms, pharmaceutical control, and laboratory testing. Labeling such as Made in France and 100% European has flourished across the city in question; a vendor proudly informs customers that his products are exclusively “vegetal, organic and French” and that he has “none of that Chinese stuff” in his boutique. Frenchness and thinking local are key marketing concerns—issues in tune with larger cultural tropes about Chinese products flooding Western markets, the term “Chinese” referring here to dangerous or deficient items (Bell & Keane, 2012).

Since the arrival of e-cigarettes on the market, France’s Public Health Council has focused on the risk of smoking renormalization and the dangers of clever marketing luring youth into unhealthy consumption habits (Haut Conseil de Santé Public, 2014). But public health positions are evolving, as scientific research fails to establish the toxicity of short-term e-cigarette use. A recent Observation Française des Drogues et des Toxicomanies (OFDT; French monitoring center for drugs and addiction) study even concluded on a positive note, suggesting that e-cigarettes are more of a “way out of smoking” than a “gateway in” (OFDT, 2014, p. 8). While Minister for Health Marisol Touraine on World No Tobacco Day 2013 likened e-cigarettes to regular cigarettes and called for their supervision, in a press conference in late 2014 she instead proclaimed “it is better to vape than to smoke, and anything that can help smokers to stop smoking is worth taking, including e-cigarettes” (Huffington Post, 2014).

At this same press conference, Touraine announced a ban on vaping on public transport, in offices, and schools—a proposal that became law in January 2016. Public health discourse appears riddled with uncertainties and contradictions: Are e-cigarettes dangerous tobacco-related products that renormalize smoking and that should be kept under surveillance? Or are they “certainly less bad” than cigarettes and to be promoted? Faced with this paradox, the HAS (National Authority for Health) advises neither to encourage nor to discourage e-cigarette use (HAS, 2014), while the WHO describes electronic delivery systems as “an evolving frontier, filled with promise and threat for tobacco control” (WHO, 2014, pp. 1–2).

In short, e-cigarettes create ideological challenges for public health, the status of nicotine being at the heart of the problem. As experts from the French monitoring center for drugs and addiction point out, policies on e-cigarettes hinge on the place and role French society is willing to give to nicotine. Is nicotine a useful, pleasurable, and harmless product comparable to caffeine, or a dangerous addictive substance to be progressively eliminated from social life? This is hardly a new debate. E-cigarette technology has largely revived 1990s controversies surrounding the arrival of the first commercial nicotine replacement technology on the market, Nicorette chewing gum, and its potential for addiction and abuse (Bell & Keane, 2014; Elam, 2015).

In public health frameworks, nicotine is an unstable and slippery substance whose properties vary—alternatively “good” (in nicotine replacement therapy), “bad” (in cigarettes), “soft” (as a gateway to harder drugs), or “hard” (as a reverse gateway from marijuana) according to the specific networks in which it is embedded (Bell & Keane, 2014, p. 50). Elam (2015) traces the tensions underlying replacement nicotine products to the “innovation scripts” (p. 537) that prefigure the contexts of use of new technological objects. Are objects scripted as a medical treatment to treat drug cravings or as a “tool of disarmament” (p. 537), an alternative device that enables nicotine to be regularly consumed in a benign way?

General reticence toward e-cigarettes appears to stem from the opposition to any type of recreational or pleasurable use of nicotine (Borland, 2011). Bell and Keane (2012) thus claim that e-cigarettes “are threatening because they suggest the pleasures of nicotine can be accessed without the harms and that a culture of smoking/vaping may be able to co-exist with the requirements of public health” (p. 9). In short, e-cigarettes are incompatible with public health agendas because of the underlying possibility they offer of permanent replacement rather than a temporary procedure ending in total cessation (Grana et al., 2014).

I have briefly sketched the contemporary political and commercial discursive situation in France in order to provide context to my ethnographic findings. Are smokers’ practices changing in light of the hostile environment? How is vaping emerging as a practice in the specific context of France?

Managing Smoking Bodies: Pleasure and Constraints

Leo is a 23-year-old smoker and father of a baby girl. He has tried to give up smoking but relates having failed due to the stressful conditions of his job as a cook. He describes smoking as an effective way to “se poser” (settle down) and pleasurably disconnect his brain during short work breaks. Leo plays sports and drinks mineral water as much as possible because it is safer than tap water. Whenever Leo smokes, he knows he is a liability to others. He holds his fingers up to the light to show me. Do I see that yellow color? When a smoker draws on a cigarette, carbon monoxide emerges. It’s a dangerous substance. When his hands sweat, it sticks on, it gets absorbed. Then, whatever he touches …

Since the social construction of “passive smoking” in the 1970s, public health policies have displaced material smoking harm and risk to third parties. Leo is constantly in doubt as to whether carbon monoxide residue is infiltrating and infecting the cherished bodies around him. Hands act as a polluted and polluting interface, and at Leo’s workplace, cigarettes are seen a serious threat to hygiene. Leo describes physical deposits that move from place to place, contaminating things and people on the way. A smoking cook’s responsibility is to eliminate all chances of carbon monoxide pollution.

Leo has invented multiple strategies to rid himself of combustion residue (postsmoking carbon monoxide deposit) and the damage it can cause when it broaches the bodily boundaries of others—traveling straight into clients’ stomachs or into his baby daughter’s lungs. Leo takes studied precautions to avoid the latter. The first is temporal, consisting of prolonged “airing” after smoking to accelerate the evaporation of invisible toxic substances and smells. Next comes a purifying ritual: Leo fills a tub with warm water and bleach to soak his hands, which he brushes thoroughly with a nailbrush. He finishes with “efficient baby products” from the chemist, normal soap and running water until “you can’t smell [the yellow stuff] and you can’t see it anymore.”

Whereas Leo’s protective strategies are directed exclusively at the wellness of others, other smokers can be more sensitive to their own bodily deterioration in a domain where health and aesthetics overlap. Like Leo, 24-year-old Fanny is concerned about the way her body soaks up the cigarettes she smokes. The daughter of a beautician, Fanny describes many everyday consequences of smoking as “constraining,” although smoking pleasure continues to override these disadvantages. She is particularly sensitive to the fact that she is ruining her skin and staining her teeth and nails. Fanny sees and experiences these transformations as damage in progress and fights to counter or repair them through daily actions. What she names her “combines” (tricks) consist in acts of concealing, whitening, and peeling, using nail polish, sodium bicarbonate, skin treatments, scrubs, and masks. These combines, which bring new non-health-related materials into the equation, are deemed to protect the body against the aesthetic hazards of smoking.

While Leo and Fanny’s preoccupations address tangible bodily surfaces, more common harm reduction strategies are aimed at the elusive inner body—in particular the lungs. Smokers’ attempts to reduce harm in the inner body usually involve an evolution of consumer purchases: a number of interlocutors related small daily changes such as opting for 100% tobacco without additives, flavor agents or coloring, purchasing organic hemp paper, or even switching to smoking (presumably less addictive) marijuana. One informant, Jem, a 25-year-old employee in a sports shop, related “cutting down” his consumption from a pack and a half to 10 cigarettes a day by simply switching from industrial cigarettes to tobacco “rollies.” This smoking reduction strategy relied on their bad taste (they don’t taste as good) and inconvenience (their preparation is more time consuming).

Over the past years, marketing has been responding to consumer fears that foods, drinks, medicines, and other everyday substances absorbed into bodies are dangerously transformed and contaminated by industrial processes. In seeking to improve product image, allusions to “purity” and a “return to nature” are now widespread. But such cosmetic changes do not comply with abstinence-oriented European Union health protocols, which seek to expose this type of packaging as deliberately misleading (European Parliament and Council, 2014).

Smoking harm is currently perceived as principally tied to a particularly damaging mode of delivery: inhaling cigarette smoke (Sweanor, Alcabes, & Drucker, 2007) rather than the absorption of nicotine itself into the body. In Jem’s amateur weekly football club, a self-imposed “15 min rule” (or “30 min rule”—there is often some debate) exists among his group of friends to counter the dangers of the passing of this “smoke” into players’ lungs. The informal “rule” recommends waiting a certain period of time after physical exertion before smoking, so that one’s lungs will have time to “close” after having “opened up” during sports. Lung expansion is perceived as a state of increased sensitivity.

Anne-Marie Mol (2008) has analyzed how the “eating self” has come into conflict with the traditional model of the Western subject, whose sources can be traced back to Greek concerns with musculature and agency. In the same way that people cannot train the internal lining of their bowels to absorb or discard sugars or vitamins, they cannot train their lungs to “open,” “close,” or discard tar and other residue. Lungs are perceived as being uncontrollably open—and thus continuously penetrated by external elements. Lungs are often considered a container (or even an “ashtray” in Leo’s words), over which people exert little agency. This organ can “fill up” with dangerous materials that transgress the malleable boundaries of the body. Heightened surveillance of lung pollution is thus central to many harm reduction strategies. E-cigarettes here represent an attractive alternative to avoid accumulating combustion residue and disease within bodies.

Voluntarily polluting one’s lungs through smoking is therefore condemned as a risk practice and can become a channel for social actors to rebel against public health regimes and ideals. Unlike Jem, 23-year-old Yann, a university student, maintains that the best cigarettes are those smoked just after physical effort—when his body is most receptive. Smoking cigarettes is a varied and malleable practice transformed by users from below. While heavy smoking can be a way to voice rejection of public health ideals, many different ways to micromanage health that do not respect public health messages exist among youth within activities classified as “risk practices.”

In France, many young smokers have internalized the message on the dangers of cigarettes publicized through public health material—and have reauthored these messages. Several informants described a dilemma: cigarettes are pleasurable and even “necessary” (to wake up in the morning, to concentrate, to counter stress, to disconnect, to digest, to get to sleep were examples given by interlocutors) but have also become perilous objects to manage. These youths readily experiment with an array of different products and substances (tobacco, rolling paper, sanitary products, beauty products, marijuana, plants, etc.) to reduce the negative effects of smoking in their own creative non-medicalized ways. E-cigarettes—devices permitting extensive bricolage—have integrated French markets at this particularly advantageous moment in time.

Managing Nicotine and Flavors as Central to Harm Reduction

Sarah is behind the counter, arranging tiny bottles onto the shelves according to category. The e-shop has just been refurbished: a minimalist white interior with smart framed menus on the walls. Its design would fit somewhere between an Apple store and a sushi shop, if it weren’t for an unusual mix of sweet smells lingering in the air.

The glass door opens and a smartly dressed woman heads straight for the counter. She orders two bottles of e-liquid dosed at 6 mg of nicotine, and gives her surname, which Sarah types into the computer. She is fishing in her purse when Sarah gently interrupts her. Is she sure she wants 6 mg? The software indicates that she only started vaping 2 weeks ago, with a dosage of 12 mg of nicotine. The client is sure that she wants to reduce her dosage. Has she completely stopped smoking? The client is embarrassed. Yes. More or less. Maybe one from time to time … Sarah is firm. “First you eliminate all the cigarettes. Then you lower the nicotine.” The two women come to a compromise. “Look, I’ll give you one 6 and one 12, there’s nothing in between on the market, that way if you want to lower your nicotine you can mix the two together and you’ll get something around 9. They’re the same price anyway.” If she goes straight down to 6 mg, she might run the risk of not being “rassasiée” (quenched/satisfied), and could find herself drawing more often and more strongly on the e-cigarette, which is bad. She might feel “frustrated” and give in to a “traditional” cigarette more easily. The client thanks her and opts for one bottle of each.

As in other studies (Dockrell, Morrison, Bauld, & McNeill, 2013; McQueen, Tower, & Sumner, 2011), the e-cigarette users encountered in the field had all been (or still were) smokers save one exception and described turning to vaping as a smoking cessation or harm reduction tool. Many interlocutors related using e-cigarettes as a way to “reduce” their tobacco consumption (using e-cigarettes throughout the day and keeping combustion cigarettes for “special” moments: coffee breaks or evening drinks with friends, for example). E-cigarettes are seen as a way to incorporate nicotine without accumulating deposits of tar, carbon monoxide, and so on, in one’s lungs, thus becoming a way for people to act upon the materials that enter their bodies.

E-cigarettes provide empowering new opportunities for tinkering with the substances absorbed by our bodies. While “tobacco” represents a concrete, identifiable substance for cigarette smokers, nicotine is more volatile, abstract, and difficult to localize. In e-cigarette substitution “science,” nicotine becomes an independent liquid entity that can be purchased. Suddenly stable, tangible, and quantifiable, nicotine becomes a substance for vapoteurs to manage. The purchase and tasting of e-liquids is normally made with knowledge of and in consideration of the exact volume of nicotine present.

Nicotine is indeed the first consideration imposed by vendors to neophytes. The first step when becoming a new client in Sarah and Cyril’s shop consists in finding the correct nicotine dose. According to vendors, this is arithmetic, and tailoring corresponds to the summing up of materials (nicotine volume by cigarette × number of cigarettes smoked per day). Calculating the right dose of nicotine according to a user’s personal practice means no longer considering smokers as universal, but as individual bodies. If self-help books and addiction specialists elaborate theories describing a single efficient pathway to tobacco cessation, e-cigarette marketers offer a new and individualized model of care. “You have to find the nicotine dose that suits you,” Sarah explains. James, a vendor in the same neighborhood, explains that the dosage “must correspond to [the client’s] consumption. That’s where I come in as a counsellor.”

Salespersons can become (medical?) advisors, first finding the right dosage, then carrying out “suivis” (follow-ups) for clients (patients?). From behind Sarah’s counter, I observe numerous conversations about the “right” and “wrong” dosages as well as clients’ motivations and attempts to change their usual dosage, encouraged or discouraged by Sarah and Cyril. The shop uses an electronic loyalty system which rewards clients with “gifts” (generally e-liquids) and automatically displays buyer history. In this ethnographic case, software was readapted by vendors as a useful technology to follow user “progress,” and as a database from which to advise users on nicotine content over time. In this new context, nicotine is commoditized and becomes a “thing” to measure, displace, and negotiate. Sarah and Cyril’s concept of effective total cessation consists in gradually “disaccustoming” the body to nicotine. The client’s health is laid out in public space, discussed and remolded by new social actors in the sui generis space of e-shops. Sarah and Cyril create and test their newfound knowledge on harm reduction on the Internet, in health and science magazines, and empirically by observing and chatting with customers.

Most of Sarah and Cyril’s annual turnover comes from e-liquid sales; they are always careful to update stocks according to the latest flavor fashions and are present to help clients choose liquids which will “suit their personal use” best. Customers can browse through glossy brand magazines at the counter and ask to taste whatever they fancy.

Taste appears to be a key factor in the newfound popularity of e-cigarettes. The most passionate users in the field compared their hobby to wine tasting or coined themselves “flavor junkies.” Enthusiast vapoteurs can discuss e-liquid flavors for hours on end, and within vaping communities, the sphere of gustatory pleasure provides a base for enriched social interaction. Vape group meetings rapidly become privileged spaces to celebrate gustation and sensory exploration as users share, compare, and pass e-liquids from hand to hand.

The arrival on the market of e-cigarettes as potentially recreational technology brings to light the importance of sensory dimensions involved in “traditional” cigarette smoking (Bevan, 2015). Interestingly, several smokers and dual users in the field spontaneously brought up the theme of palatability, describing the “good taste” of tobacco in combustion compared to the “sweet,” “strange,” or “bad-tasting” e-cigarette vapor. E-cigarette manufacturers appear to be far ahead of social scientists in recognizing taste as a defining factor in smoking practices and have expanded their product lines to occupy this realm. E-cigarette shop windows across the city welcome passersby to discover the “taste kingdom” or boast “non-stop pleasure.” As Szmigin and collaborators have noted, marketing and advertising for licit substances such as alcohol are generally much more in tune with consumers’ experiences of pleasure than are public health policies (Holt & Treboar, 2008).

The industrialization of foodstuffs and the globalization of eating habits have raised fears in France over the past decade. National health campaigns have sprung up against “malbouffe” (junk food) and “gourmandises” (sweet food), fighting to (re)-educate the population toward a “healthier” diet. E-cigarette marketers have taken advantage of this by offering these same discredited foodstuffs (Coca Cola, Red Bull, Haribo sweets, Nutella, etc.) as vapor, advertising a world of pleasure—the benefits of smoking and tasty foodstuffs without the harm.

Coveney and Bunton (2003) reveal how public health discourse has long been mistrustful of pleasure, especially carnal pleasure linked to drug use. Substitution is viewed as a serious matter by public health actors—therapeutic products are not intended to be “fun,” much less “tasty.” Pleasure, in this case gustatory pleasure, is seen as dangerous—the implicit argument behind the European Union’s decision to prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes and the WHO’s call for a ban on e-liquids tasting of fruit, candy, or alcoholic beverages (WHO, 2014). Tastiness is here seen as a mask to conceal toxicity and as bait to attract youth, with the underlying notion that access to substances (cigarettes) is facilitated by sweetness or tastiness. Public health policies aim to protect populations from such dangerous sensory “illusions.”

Tastiness and gourmandise undermine temporary nicotine replacement models that lead to total cessation, contradicting contemporary abstinence-based public health models and ideals. The e-cigarette industry’s marketing of tastiness is thus a move to open a market irrespective of public health policy. My ethnographic data confirm that e-cigarettes blur the boundaries between the recreational and therapeutic uses of nicotine, as suggested by Bell and Keane (2012). The social use and pleasurable experimenting with products clearly sidesteps the public health model of pharmaceutical substitution.

The Sociability of E-cigarettes: When Health Meets Pleasure

Quitting smoking is a life-changing choice for many smokers. In-depth interviews with young French smokers revealed how deeply cigarettes are embedded in everyday situations and relationships. Users described how cigarettes dissolve barriers and lead to spontaneous or organized moments of privileged sharing at work, university, during leisure time, in amorous relationships, and so on. Social scientists have given detailed accounts of how cigarettes can act as social lubricant or “glue”: Complex relations are built around them and the meanings of inclusion in a community of smokers are strong (e.g., Haines et al., 2009; Nichter, 2003; Reed, 2007). In light of this, quitting smoking signifies transforming established relationships and distancing oneself from social interaction groups. Jem (introduced above) relates how he had a nervous breakdown while trying to quit smoking, and the unhappiness that ensued from this attempt.

There was something missing from my life. And it’s funny, I felt like I wasn’t the same person anymore. I was sharing a flat with a friend, and strangely, when I stopped smoking, our relationship was a bit different. It was a bit tenser. Since I wasn’t smoking, we couldn’t share that moment together anymore. For me, smoking is a kind of sharing. When I had friends who quit, I was … I didn’t like it. I felt like I had lost something we had in common.

Substance use, or its cessation, has the power to irrevocably transform relationships. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that solidarity networks and support groups for e-cigarette users have blossomed. Moreover, enthusiast vapoteurs have something stronger in common than smoking cessation. E-cigarette equipment can be relatively varied and complex to use, and neophytes must engage in a “learning curve” as mentioned by McQueen, Tower, and Sumner (2011) before becoming competent vapoteurs. Members do more than replace smoking solidarities; they come together to celebrate a new practice and novel possibilities.

The home page of one open forum dedicated to vaping reads: “We are a big family. We intend to provide continuous support, from the discovery of e-cigarettes to the evolution of confirmed vapoteurs.” User profiles display statuses according to personal experience ranging from “beginner” to “expert” (with more recreational possibilities: “sunburnt,” “full body tan,” “broke,” etc.). Members are encouraged to design their own “signatures” that bear witness to their definitive smoking cessation (displaying the number of “killers” avoided since), measuring user vaping history in number of months, days, and hours.

Forums such as these act as informal spaces for users to discuss health, technical issues, and personal problems through themed headings. Information is published and members are invited to gain awareness of legal matters and participate in broader forms of solidarity such as online petitions. Internet users can choose to confirm their vaping identity (vaping changed my life!) or to compare potentially embarrassing bodily matters (such as transit) or psychological weaknesses (I can’t manage) behind the shield of anonymity. Conversation threads include calls for help on weight loss or gain, demands for advice on relationship problems (my partner doesn’t support my decision to vape, what should I do?), or frustration with vaping equipment (my e-cigarette keeps leaking, please help).

Virtual and physical spaces can be continuous, as small acts of solidarity unfold. Locating, translating, and rendering intelligible foreign press releases, scientific studies, and policy documents on e-cigarettes for others is seen as a key responsibility for expert web users. Lately, Dr. Farsalinos’s interview was transcribed, translated, and synthesized to keep other users updated on the toxicity of different vaping products. On another occasion, health alerts were translated and posted by members on multiple online spaces after news broke out in the United States that GPlat Wire (wire used by experienced vapoteurs to make their own resistance coils) contained manganese, a neurotoxic heavy metal. Members checked that others had heard at the next vape meeting. “Expert” vapoteurs here become informal watchdogs for the vaping community.

Specific forum pages provide links to “Vapo’days” (city or regional meetings). Vapo’days revolve around intergenerational moments of commensality and provide regular occasions for developing social relations and comparing experiences and vaping equipment. The discussion topics at a July “Vap’nique” (wordplay on “vape” and “picnic”) in the city park revealed the multiple facets of sociality and solidarity in progress.

On one side of a tartan picnic rug dappled in sunlight, a man asks quietly around him whether anyone else had changed weight when they had stopped smoking. He had put on 5 kg. What is he on? One man asks. Pausing to draw on an intricate wooden e-cigarette and exhaling a large cloud of apple and cinnamon vapor, he replies: 0 mg of nicotine. “It’s the nicotine, it makes you burn calories. It affects the brain,” a second man ventures. Well, he had had nicotine in it before and it made absolutely no difference, he was putting on weight anyway. The four of us shift position and recline to enjoy the now bearable late afternoon sunshine, slowly absorbing each other’s smoking histories, tales of transition and experience of e-cigarettes.

Seated nearby in a circle in the shade, a larger group is leaning over a pile of small bottles of different colors, shapes and sizes. A woman in her forties is interested in how long e-liquids should be kept. The younger woman on her right answers “Officially, a year, but I think you can keep them a bit longer than that.” While passing around a plastic tub overflowing with homemade brownies, the group goes on to discuss their preferred brands of e-liquid and to question the traceability of e-liquid contents. The five members converge on a general aversion to Chinese liquids as lacking sufficient safety regulations.

Ethnographic data show that the self-management of health involves the “fashioning and rationing of pleasure in ways that are highly socially situated” (Coveney & Bunton, 2003, p. 167). Vapo’days are spaces in which users can reflect upon bodily ingestion and share knowledge on the meanings of different substances with other users, create narratives for their past and present practices, and teach or acquire new techniques. Interactions continue online with YouTube tutorials and chat pages, while city groups rival and compete to host record-breaking events, ranging from “accrobranche” (tree climbing) to rugby, board game events to wild nights out, alongside regular Sunday picnics where partners and children are welcome. Moments of sharing are recorded on mobile phones and uploaded to social networks, where users are later identified and labeled.

Following Becker, Race (2008) defines pleasure as “a medium of a process of learning in which new techniques and procedures are acquired” (p. 420). Spaces of leisure and socialization allow users to confirm and compare experiences of vaping pleasure—Vapo’days are decidedly not substitution-themed health meetings. Forums, social media, and scheduled meetings are spaces where sensory and social pleasure, health, aesthetics, and technique are entangled and where solidarity, commensality, politics, and marketing overlap. Here users can cross-reference medical advice with others’ perceived experiences of substances and gain access to techniques to increase pleasure.

Conclusion

In France, smokers are targeted daily by a variety of messages and images, suggesting that they might die, become infertile, or get aged skin. At the tobacconist’s, public health messages at the counter invoke smokers to quit and consult their general practitioner. The French term for giving up smoking (sevrage tabagique) is uninviting in itself, as it literally means “weaning” (as in babies from breast milk) and evokes images of cutting off and violent withdrawal. As this vocabulary suggests, tobacco control frameworks are not only abstinence oriented but often celebrate moral values such as humility (in asking for help), self-discipline, renunciation, and sacrifice—attributes that Bell, McNaughton, and Salmon (2011) recall are historically intertwined with White, Christian, middle-class values. These fit uneasily with the values of contemporary French youth, who are more likely to celebrate independence, gustatory pleasure, hedonism, and se lâcher (letting go).

The youths I met in the field were of course well informed about the dangers of smoking. While young smokers appear to have internalized many of the public health messages on the risks of smoking, they have often also re-authored these messages. They readily engage in activities such as removing carbon monoxide deposits from their hands with disinfectant, rubbing sodium bicarbonate on their teeth, or switching to organic products, tobacco “rollies,” or even marijuana to reduce harm to themselves and others in creative non-medicalized ways.

E-cigarettes emerge as a valued substitution to conventional combustion cigarettes since they provide novel opportunities to reduce harm—while simultaneously allowing for the elaboration of pleasure. Ethnographic data collected in France suggest that the newfound popularity of e-cigarettes resides in the possibilities of refined tasting, new forms of social bonding, and the extensive tinkering these provide. While nicotine replacement products such as patches and gum are designed as unique, immutable, and unobtrusive pharmaceutical products, e-cigarettes are not therapy and lend themselves to experimentation. Users can engage in extensive forms of harm reduction by engaging directly with more of the materials that enter their bodies. Lowering nicotine so as to progressively “disaccustom” the body to the addictive substance is an exciting option. By quantifying nicotine, sharing novel flavors, acquiring new techniques, and discussing them with others, vaping can become an elaborate (and sometimes ostentatious) social activity and an emerging practice in itself.

While industries advertise them as healthier, glamorous, and permanent alternatives to smoking, public health policy makers call for caution while attempting to legally contain these slippery substances and decide whether e-cigarettes are physiologically and morally dangerous goods or not. Manufacturers have picked up on current consumer interest in harm reduction and have adapted their products accordingly. Product images have changed, with packaging alluding to purity or a “return to nature.” E-cigarette advertisements claim legitimacy by referring to traceability, natural vegetal substances, pharmaceutical control, and Frenchness. The e-cigarette industry’s marketing of tastiness and gourmandise openly dissociates from temporary nicotine replacement models ending in total cessation, thus marking a move to open a market irrespective of public health policy.