When Kimberley Velasquez started vaping six years ago, electronic cigarettes were scarce in San Antonio.
Velasquez, director of inbound sales at Career Point College, smoked traditional cigs for 25 years. She wanted to quit after losing both of her parents to cancer, so she ordered an e-cigarette online — just about the only place she could get her hands on one.
Though she readily took to her e-cig, also called a vaporizer, she’d sometimes slip back to smoking cigarettes simply because the new kind were so hard to find.
That’s no longer a problem.
“Once [vape] stores opened up around here, I had no excuse,” Velasquez, 47, told the San Antonio Current. “It changed my life.”
Booming Industry
Vaping has boomed nationwide in the past few years, San Antonio being no exception. Dozens of vape shops have sprouted up in the Alamo City, giving rise to a robust and nuanced culture of tinkerers, hobbyists and anti-cigarette crusaders.
Vaporizers come in a range of shapes and sizes, but they’re basically battery-powered smoking devices that heat up a chemical cocktail, known as “juice,” to produce an inhalable vapor. Each juice flavor comes in varying strengths of nicotine — some are actually nicotine-free.
Most people, like Velasquez, start vaping to stop smoking traditional cigarettes. But even after kicking the habit, many stick around after becoming fascinated with vaping culture: trying different flavors, experimenting with vaporizer modifications and tapping into the vast online network of fellow vapers to swap tips and tricks on blowing the biggest clouds.
The community aspect is what attracts many vapers, according to Josh Brown, an employee at the North Side shop Vape Air Lounge.
“People like the flavor and hanging out at the shop,” Brown said. “You get to sit back and kick it with people who have similar interests, talk shop.”
Brown’s entire family — mother, father and even grandmother — quit smoking cigarettes by switching to vaporizers. Like many vapers, he raves about his improved health, the money he’s saved and no longer smelling like an ashtray.
The jury’s still out on long-term health concerns when it comes to e-cigs; medically, it’s just starting to be researched. But the overall consensus thus far is that they’re not as dangerous as cigarettes.
Vaping also transcends generations. Although users dkew young, it’s not unheard of to meet senior citizens taking to this cultural phenomenon.
A typical e-cig starter kit costs about $60, with a one-ounce bottle of juice running about $20.
But there are more elaborate, expensive options. Upgrades are available for every part of a vaporizer and dedicated vapers drop serious cash to get their gear just right.
Brown built himself a customized model just so he could blow gargantuan vapor clouds — shelling out $300 in parts.
‘Eureka Moment’
Randal Sterling’s story is a common one in vaping circles. He smoked for decades and could never kick the habit until he picked up vaping.
“It was a eureka moment,” Sterling said, describing his first puff of an e-cigarette in 2011 at a mall kiosk.
But Sterling took his vaping obsession further than most. The former radio and television ad salesman ordered $600 worth of vaping supplies from China and sold them at a marked-up price to customers and colleagues in SA.
In a few months, he was running a store out of his garage. By the start of 2012, he had moved into his first brick-and-mortar location, Thanks for Vaping, in a business park on Blanco Road.
Sterling’s business has boomed with the San Antonio vaping scene. He sold $60,000 worth of products a month when he started the business. Last year, he almost topped $3 million in sales.
Like many vape shops, Sterling’s stores — he’s got two now, with a third on the way — are part lounge, part workshop and part showroom. Tall barstools sit around two circular tables topped with dozens of juice flavors that customers can sample. At the counter, columns of dense smoke tumble out of employees’ nostrils, vaporizers clutched in hand like Linus’ blanket.
Most shops tend to keep regular business hours, though some stay open late on weekend nights for social events.
Sterling’s shop was one of the first in the Alamo City. Despite the growth of his business paralleling the industry’s overall expansion, Sterling expects some vape shops to eventually shutter.
At its peak about a year ago, San Antonio had about 75 vape shops. There are now about 50, nearly all clustered on the North Side.
Whether the market is still oversaturated or stable depends on whom you ask.
“We’re going through a period of expansion and then we’re going to see a period of consolidation. That’s kind of a natural phase of business, a cycle,” said Sterling, whose vaping business has now become a full-time gig.
But Bill Maxey, owner of Bad Wolf Vape, said that the SA vape scene is “behind” other metropolitan areas, with room to grow. Dallas and Houston both boast more than 100 vape shops. There are around 60 in Austin.
Maxey smoked Marlboro Gold 100s for 26 years — and he was committed.
“I was going to die with a cigarette in my mouth. Thankfully I found [vaping]. It was an alternative, and it worked for me,” said Maxey, 45.
Now he and his wife own two vape shops in SA. He still works full time in IT, taking night shifts at his shops. For him, helping people quit smoking through vaping is a passion.
Shops such as Thanks for Vaping and Bad Wolf Vape try to cultivate a professional and positive image. They distance themselves from head shops and preach proper vaping etiquette to their customers: don’t vape in non-smoking areas, don’t condescend to non-vapers or smokers, don’t blow vapor in people’s faces.
Doing so can help San Antonio avoid the regulatory fate of other locales. Though various municipalities have outlawed indoor vaping, it’s still legal in SA. And there are few regulations for shop owners, other than the new state law barring e-cigarette sales to minors.
Members of San Antonio’s vaping community want to keep regulations to a minimum — particularly since the local vaping wave may not have yet crested.
Bonnie Herzog, a national beverage and tobacco analyst with Wells Fargo, said that e-cigarette sales could outpace traditional cigarettes within a decade.
Herzog estimated that the domestic vaping market will reach $3.5 billion by the end of 2015 — a full $1 billion stronger than 2014.
Vaping Connoisseurs
Maxey and Sterling’s stores cater mainly to mainstream vapers — folks who enjoy the ritual, the flavor and the health benefits they feel from keeping off cigarettes.
Others cater to a more niche market: vapers whose interest in tinkering with their vaporizers borders on obsession. This crowd, including Vape Air Lounge’s Brown, tends to skew younger. There’s an arms race among them to see who can blow the biggest clouds, and who can eke the most flavor out of their modified e-cigs.
Like any sub-culture, there’s a certain thrill in rattling off the kind of opaque jargon that’s gibberish to the uninitiated. And rattle they do — about new gear, modifications, flavors. Talking shop is half the fun and weighing the merits of an ever-expanding menu of juice flavors is a favorite topic of discussion.
Vaping flavors have sped past the normal array of what you might find at the snow cone stand.
The most popular flavor at Brown’s shop, for instance, is Heisenberg — a Breaking Bad homage made by Innovape that tastes like “blue ice pops.” Campfire by Velvet Cloud Vapor tastes like graham cracker, chocolate and marshmallows. An earl grey-flavored juice made by Vigilante Juice Co., dubbed Grey Ghost, mixes “tea steeped to perfection … with sweet cream, tied together with a twist of lemon.”
Discussions at the counter of any vape store in town sound more like a sommelier’s convention than any conversation in a head shop.
Vapers waft fumes from tiny bottles to their noses, complimenting the earthy notes from an oak barrel-aged juice. Shop owners show off high-dollar premium flavors, their caps sealed in wax like a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
Juice prices run the gamut. There’s something for everyone, even vapers on a budget.
“Some of it is just Boone’s Farm juice and some of it is like the most complicated French wine you could ever get,” Maxey said.
Flavor fads come and go, too. In San Antonio, cereals were big a couple months ago — now it’s yogurt.
Different demographic groups also tend to have their favorites. Recent cigarette smokers tend to look for tobacco flavors. For whatever reason, Brown said, women in their 60s and 70s favor key lime pie.
Health Risks?
Airman 1st Class Tom Le, who moved from Oregon to San Antonio after joining the Air Force, prefers Blackjack — a tart mix of blueberries and jackfruit. A rare vaper who has never smoked a cigarette, Le buys juice without nicotine.
Le started vaping after learning about it from his friends. He likes the smell and the taste, and he uses it as a way to unwind.
“Work is so stressful, I just [vape] at home to relax and have fun,” Le told the Current outside Thanks for Vaping shop on San Pedro Avenue.
Le is convinced that vaping won’t harm his lungs. But that’s not an opinion shared by many health professionals in SA and beyond.
Michael Siegel, a professor of health science at Boston University and a tobacco industry expert, said that he was extremely skeptical of e-cigarettes when he first heard of them around 2006.
“I just assumed that it was a new tobacco industry ploy to try to pretend that they had come out with this new safer product,” Siegel said.
But Siegel dug deeper. He poured through reams of reports and listened to personal accounts of vapers. What he found surprised him.
“My interpretation of the science is that there’s no question that electronic cigarettes are much, much safer for you than tobacco cigarettes,” Siegel said — even if they’re packing nicotine.
That doesn’t mean e-cigs are risk-free. Since they’re still a fairly new technology, little is known about the long-term effects of vaping. And only the most lemming-like disciples assert that vaping is completely healthy.
“Putting anything into your lungs that’s not air is a detriment to you. We realize that, and we never candy-coat it,” Maxey said. “It’s always billed as harm reduction.”
Sandra Adams, a pulmonologist at SA’s University of Texas Health Science Center, worries that the message may not get through to everyone.
Adams, who gets asked about vaping “every day,” conceded that vaping is fine for people who are already addicted to cigarettes. But she’s worried about potential long-term effects and whether too many kids are attracted to the bright packaging and assorted flavors.
The number of middle and high school students who used e-cigarettes tripled between 2013 and 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Protection.
Many e-cigarettes also lack regulation by the Food and Drug Administration, which means that juice formulas can vary from brand to brand or even bottle to bottle.
“If you can go from one or two packs a day to an e-cigarette and then get off, I think that’s a really great option,” Adams said. “But there needs to be a quit date for the e-cigarette as well.”
She likened the current state of research to cigarettes in the 1950s — when even the country’s surgeon general smoked. Back then, some tobacco companies and health professionals alike touted cigarettes as a weight loss and focus tool.
“[E-cigarettes] haven’t been around long enough to know the toxicities and the problems with long-term use of the devices,” Adams said. “We’re probably going to find out that they’re much more harmful than they’re advertised to be right now.”
Although she loves her vaporizer and doesn’t understand the panic over using it, Velasquez’s goal is to eventually stop vaping altogether.
“It’s healthier than cigarettes, but not vaping is healthiest,” Velasquez said. “I could have never quit without it. It’s been a game-changer for me.”
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2015.