In May, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first fruit-flavored vape in American history. To the layman, this may not seem like groundbreaking news, but with the clearance for mango and blueberry, made by a small company in Los Angeles called Glas, a regulatory hurdle that had defeated the entire industry for the better part of a decade was overcome. This was hailed, quite correctly, as a landmark.

By the same token, and at risk of souring news of this development, it is worth pointing out what an adult must now do to inhale that mango. Here’s a quick step-by-step.

You buy the device, download an app, and upload a photograph of your government-issued ID and then a selfie, so the software can confirm that the person on the license is the person holding the phone. You then pair the vape to that phone over Bluetooth. From then on, the app performs random biometric check-ins to confirm the registered adult is still the one vaping. Wander too far from your phone, and the device stops working. 

None of this is satire, by the way. To enjoy what many would describe as a relatively innocent pastime, these steps must be executed to use a product that is demonstrably healthier than smoking tobacco. This is one of the most heavily supervised legal products in the country, and remember, it is a flavored vape we are talking about here.

What’s the Thinking?

In all fairness, the reasoning is not entirely stupid, which is actually what makes it quite interesting. The FDA had spent years refusing fruit flavors on the grounds that teenagers like them, a position supported by the inconvenient fact that, well, teenagers do. Glas merely solved the problem at the hardware level, meaning that a minor who gets hold of the device cannot activate it, because a minor cannot pass the ID check. 

The agency tested this and found that adults sailed through while the young did not. So, once again in all fairness, on its own terms, it is a system that works.

The government has finally accepted a thing Britain accepted around 2015, which is that a grown adult trying to quit cigarettes might reasonably want something that does not taste of cigarettes. The difference is that Britain reached this conclusion and then simply let people buy the things. Bravo, blighty. America reached the same conclusion and built a facial-recognition checkpoint in front of it, built around various steps that would leave the most unforgiving TSA agent empathetic. 

The Wrong Customer?

The story shifts when considering the R Street Institute, which looked at the same approval everyone else was applauding and deftly pointed out that the technology is calibrated for the confident, higher-income, digitally fluent user. In other words, the person who installs apps without exasperation. As you probably guessed, the trouble is that this is not the typical person who most needs to quit smoking.

The heaviest disease burden falls on older, poorer smokers, who take up vaping at far lower rates than the young and who, according to the research R Street cites, often need help pairing Bluetooth and tend to distrust digital health tools on principle alone. A vape that demands a selfie in good lighting and stops working when the battery dies is precisely the friction this group cannot be bothered with. And who would blame them? 

Essentially, the FDA has approved a harm-reduction product engineered to be least usable by the people it would help most. Congratulations all round.

A Growing Unauthorized Market

A further problem is that none of this touches the actual market. Somewhere near seventy percent of the vapes Americans buy are unauthorized disposables, shipped from overseas, available in every flavor the mind can possibly conjure (tuna vape, anyone?), and sold with roughly the age verification of a lemonade stand, which is to say, none at all. 

The teenager that the whole system is built to stop is not queuing for a biometric check. They are buying a bright plastic thing over the counter for fifteen dollars, just as they always have, while laughing joyfully at the old geezer trying to figure out the biometric settings on his 18-year-old Nokia. 

For what it is worth, the Glas pods cost around twelve dollars a pack, on top of the proprietary device and the app that maps your usage. In light of that, you would be forgiven for concluding that the government has not put in place a barrier to youth vaping, but a premium product for the sort of adult who was never the problem, wrapped in enough surveillance to make the announcement sound responsible.

And with that conclusion, we arrive at the real meat on the bone. A cynic might say the whole point of this lies with optics. 

Boring Alternative

The truth is that the adult who simply wants to quit already had the answer, and it does not involve biometrics. Of course it doesn’t. A proper refillable vape makes no demands of your face. It does not pair, ping, or lock, and it does not stop working because you left the room. You own it, you fill it, and no app is building a map of when you reached for it. 

There is a certain dignity in a device that trusts you to be the adult you already legally are.

America has decided that the way to make nicotine responsible is to make it watch you, while Britain decided the adult could be left alone to get on with it, undisturbed. Once again, America finds itself light-years behind its cousin across the pond when it comes to vaping.