This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

For decades, people have been trying to figure out how to create a cigarette without many of the downsides.

You know, the things that make smoking the biggest cause of preventable death in America, the tar, the carcinogens, and all that stuff.

Cigarette companies tried to create quote unquote safe combustion-free smoking devices as far back as the 1980s. They were all huge flops. Then in

the 2000s, e-cigarettes first hit the market. These early models looked almost like cigarettes

but they gave themselves away in subtle ways.

If you looked really closely you could see that they were made of plastic or metal and they had a little

glowing light on the tip meant to resemble the cherry at the end of a lit cigarette.

Or you might remember the big clunky vaporizers

that resembled walkie talkies and required users to tinker with battery coils

and pour so-called e-liquid into them by hand.

None of these ended up breaking into the mainstream.

Until in 2015, a company called Jewel Labs

rolled out a new nicotine vape that caught fire, both with adult smokers who use them to kick

their old-fashioned smoking habit and with young people, children who just thought they were cool.

The jewel became a phenomenon, not strictly speaking as a smoking

cessation device, but as an entirely new habit, jeweling. In addition to limiting some of the harm

of smoking, it seemed to threaten an entire generation with nicotine addiction.

The new podcast backfired, the vaping wars, dives into the stories behind the jewel success and its failures.

Listening to the show, it's clear that what began as an arguably promising

innovation in harm reduction inspired a backlash that in turn opened the door to a veritable

Wild West of vaping products. Today we're going to present you with the first episode

...