Disposables, yes, but at least where I’m from there was a big independent industry of “flavor” industries that quickly popped up around 2015, and in those years hardware had a ton of manufacturers and “DIY” aspects. You’d make your own liquids and coils using cheap specialized metal wire and cotton and you could go on for months with 20€. Then a bunch of absolute horseshit laws from both the national and EU level seemed to try and make that experience as inconvenient as possible, for example requiring you to buy half-filled bottles that you must fill yourself using nicotine bases that can be no bigger than 10ml, resulting in 3-4 small disposable plastic bottles per liquid that you buy. Several countries limited what flavors you can buy, and/or regulated the market such that there is only one or two brands of approved hardware manufacturers.
Now if you think that reducing accessibility of vapes is good, this would all be fine and dandy, but at the same time all the kids are vaping disposables, which are not subject to some of the same restrictions and you can buy online or in corner stores for the price of a pack of cigs. Of course almost all the brands are owned by old tobacco money, but I still can’t really understand how we took a perfectly good and simple system like an electronic cigarette with a decent industry behind it, made it borderline illegal, and then normalized the same thing but imported from a cartel, that works the exact same except that they refuse to put two holes for refilling and charging it. Fucking disposable lithium batteries in 2026.
Disposables, yes, but at least where I’m from there was a big independent industry of “flavor” industries that quickly popped up around 2015, and in those years hardware had a ton of manufacturers and “DIY” aspects. You’d make your own liquids and coils using cheap specialized metal wire and cotton and you could go on for months with 20€. Then a bunch of absolute horseshit laws from both the national and EU level seemed to try and make that experience as inconvenient as possible, for example requiring you to buy half-filled bottles that you must fill yourself using nicotine bases that can be no bigger than 10ml, resulting in 3-4 small disposable plastic bottles per liquid that you buy. Several countries limited what flavors you can buy, and/or regulated the market such that there is only one or two brands of approved hardware manufacturers.
Now if you think that reducing accessibility of vapes is good, this would all be fine and dandy, but at the same time all the kids are vaping disposables, which are not subject to some of the same restrictions and you can buy online or in corner stores for the price of a pack of cigs. Of course almost all the brands are owned by old tobacco money, but I still can’t really understand how we took a perfectly good and simple system like an electronic cigarette with a decent industry behind it, made it borderline illegal, and then normalized the same thing but imported from a cartel, that works the exact same except that they refuse to put two holes for refilling and charging it. Fucking disposable lithium batteries in 2026.