The ongoing conflation of vaping and tobacco industry e-cigarettes is an intentional misdirection and a dangerous one. 

The strongest observation John Safran makes in his book Puff Piece is that the tobacco giant Philip Morris International has bastardised language to reinvent itself as a health and wellness tech start-up. An example of such a linguistic contortion is PMI’s mission to ‘unsmoke the world’, with company CEO Jacek Olczak claiming their “objective is to fully leave cigarettes behind to one day become a smoke-free company.” 

Intrigued by the absurdity of a leading tobacco company pledging to end smoking, Safran’s Puff investigates Philip Morris...