So... Vaping

[enoch driscoll]

I'm writing a book about Alice in wonderland, but there is a twist where, instead of Alice, they inhabitants of wonderland find themselves with an inner city kid. i want to steal from the movie and have the Caterpillar smoking a pipe, but i figured, why not make it a bit more inner city? the only problem is that i am totally not inner city and i'm even home-schooled. I've hardly even seen a vape, so please, fill me in on the details.

If you have any info on more sophisticated forms of smoking, those are welcome as well.

 

[Slartibartfast]

Not sure what details would be helpful, I'm sure you can Google for pictures of vapes themselves but here's a guess at what might be relevant:

There are two main components, a tank and a battery. The tank is easily detached and most models need the tank to be removed for refilling which most users may do a few times per day depending on their needs (mix of tank size, how much liquid the vape burns, and how much they use it). Most users recharge their batteries overnight and will buy a battery which will last them a day or more. The tank holds a small amount of liquid (typically 2-5ml) and contains a heating coil. The coil is a consumable and may last anywhere between a few days and a few weeks. The liquid is a mix of polypropylene glycol, vegetable glycerine, nicotine salts and flavouring. Nicotine is optional, but it's kind of an odd habit if you're not addicted to nicotine. If you can imagine a flavour, somebody somewhere makes it.

The lines are a bit blurred now but there is a split between normal vapes and sub-ohm vapes. Sub-ohm vapes use a slightly different class of coil to burn a lot more liquid. If you see somebody producing about as much smoke as a cigarette, then it's a normal one. If they're filling up their car with fog, or filling whole rooms with a lingering haze, then they're sub-ohming.

In terms of use, it can give you a dry mouth and sometimes it makes people cough but it's more of a dry/irritated cough which is very intermittent (single cough when inhaling) as opposed to the sporadic bouts of hacking coughing that tobacco smokers get. People do not seem to have any reaction to second-hand vaping. I've heard people say they don't like it but that seems more like a personal choice than an adverse reaction. The smell of the flavourings can linger in the air in a room for quite a while, but it doesn't stick to fabric (curtains/clothes etc) in the same way as cigarette smoke.

 

[cak85]

Not sure if this answers your question but it may. A main questions I have though is - how deep into inner city culture do you want to go? It is cool and interesting if your characters are from the inner city, it adds a different spin to Alice in Wonderland. As a potential reader, I would want to see more than just vaping to show they are inner city.

Here is also my experience with smoking:

As someone who has smoked a good amount of that stuff in high school and college - one thing I can tell you about is the sheer creativity of household objects that people use to get high or places you use to store narcotics. So it doesn't even need to be a vape pen. It can really be anything. It can even be an apple, a soda bottle or a garden hose.

Or that you could empty out a highlighter to store things inside of it.

So maybe you can use a basic Vape style pipe but think of how it can be a little?