I used to think that we were the future.
Not through any false claims that we were saving lives. We weren’t. But we were doing a pretty good job of filling the space left behind.
Smoking was on the way out. Someone was going to monetize the withdrawal, may as well be us.
I was running brand for a mid-tier vape startup. ZeroFog - matte pods, modern geometric logo, influencers in bomber jackets. I mean, it wasn’t cool. Not really. Just trying to fool enough people that we were. But we were clean. And for a while, clean was just the price of entry, not the goal.
So I wasn’t selling health, not exactly. We sold…an alternative. You couldn’t pitch poison any more, instead we sold vapor in a box and tried to call it a visionary product.
First time we saw a Respiron strip, we laughed about it in the office. It was a crappy YouTube video. Someone with shaky hands, not very well lit, and then a big red CURED written in red across a lung scan. It was…lame.
But by the end of the month, our investors had pulled out.
And a few months later, we were a bought and owned subsidiary of Northridge Tobacco Holdings. Part of a bundle of similar acquisitions, “alternative delivery ventures”, all being absorbed into their Revive Division.
Most of the team got let go. Those that were left got carved up; chemists to R&D, ops to procurement, a few UX designers sent to something called the Nicotine Lifecycle. Me? I got shifted into Legacy Integration.
Another way of putting that…it’s burying your brand.
It wasn’t the tobacco companies that killed us. It was cancer. Or more precisely, its absence.
Respiron didn’t make smoking safe, but it did make it survivable. And it turns out that was more than enough.
Those sleek pods we were selling, suddenly they looked like timid little half-measures. We were halfway to building a whole industry based on fear-avoidance. And now you could just pop to the pharmacy and cure that fear.
Cigarettes. The real thing. Wrapped in paper, tactile, smelling of smoke. They made a comeback so fast we got whiplash.
Their new ads didn’t go for irony. Sometimes they touched on nostalgia. But most of the time they were just…triumphant.
What’s stopping you now?
They’ve taken down most of the clean-air signs in my condo. They’re technically still policy, but there’s no enforcement. No budget. No point, really.
People are back to smoking in stairwells. At networking events. Sometimes on the subway.
I see people light up during a video call. Say it calms them down. Nobody else says a thing.
There’s a ZeroFog starter kit on a shelf in my apartment. It’s still in its box, even though the plastic’s started to yellow a bit.
I picked it up last week, I’d forgotten how light it was.
Despite the marketing bullshit and the big claims in the monthly staff town-halls, we weren’t trying to change the world. Just trying to own the next version of it. If it had to be cleaner then we’d make it cleaner. That wasn’t the point. The point was to make sure nicotine stayed profitable.
And we were doing fine, until the thing everyone was scared of suddenly stopped being fatal.
Once death is off the table, nobody seemed to care how gross it is.
We’ve split up the market three ways.
There’s the Reclaimers, the old-school smokers. They’d left, but now they were back with a vengeance. Lighting up with pride, smiling like it’s their birthright.
Our Quantified Crowd optimizes everything. They measure and time their Respiron doses, run their inhalation sensors, manage their flavor telemetry. Nicotine’s just another part of their biometric tracking.
And of course there’s the Never-Quitters. The old base, now kept alive and solvent by those Respiron bundle offers. Clearfield Red cartons and cancer cures. They sell them in combo packs now.
Everyone else just holds their nose. It’s not worth fighting it any more.
It’s really tough to outlaw a bad habit if it comes with a cure.
Northridge execs called me in last month. Want me to start working to bring back one of the old legacy brands, Graymont.
I think they called it “disruption and heritage appeal” in the project meeting. So I have to make it feel rebellious, but also like it’s always been there.
It’s a big project. Should be interesting work. Keeps me moving forward, and there aren’t many industries still hiring people like me.
The biggest new investment is the Respiron combination services. Northridge offers subscription cures, balanced by your usage analytics. We can predict your relapses, manage them.
My niece is on one of their teen plans. She’s sixteen. She smokes Lorien Lights and gets a Respiron discount when she uses her school ID.
I wonder if there are ways it might have played out another way.
What if Respiron had been more unstable and it’d taken longer to test. Kept it under FDA review. Or some of those patents had been kept locked up. Might have seen the vapes hold the industry middle ground. The smoking culture might have stalled for longer, and people stayed more cautious.
It didn’t happen that way, and maybe it never would have. People didn’t want better. They just wanted freedom without the worst consequences.
Tonight the air outside my building smells of charcoal and spit. Used to be that kids had to hide the habit from their parents. Now my neighbor’s teens bum St. James’ Cut off her on the balcony and bicker with each other about who’s got a better Respiron plan.
My neighbor says it feels like the 70s again.
Before my time. But I get her point.
So everything old is new again, and it’s more profitable than it ever was.