'The best spin': discourses of vaping intoxication, pleasure, and 'poisoning'

Anti-tobacco public health campaigns portray e-cigarettes and cigarettes as interchangeable nicotine-delivery systems, describing ‘vapes’ as a gateway to combustible tobacco use. Some vape users, however, portray vaping as producing a qualitatively different drug experience, describing the pursuit of fleeting, dizzy moments of intoxication sometimes described as ‘head spins’. Recent anti-vape campaigns have seized upon the language of head spins, describing it as a symptom of nicotine poisoning, a portrayal at odds with vape users’ phenomenological accounts of vaping experiences. Framings of vaping experiences that reduce the pleasures of vaping to a poison effect fail to explain how and why young people are drawn to vaping. We need empirical understandings of drug experiences to inform public health policy, which means listening to users and how they phenomenologically describe their embodied drug experiences. We therefore undertook a qualitative study of 24 young people, both vape users and nonusers. We found that the intoxicating effect described as `head spins’ is actively sought by vape users who see it as a distinguishing aspect of high-nicotine content vapes, compared to combustible cigarettes. Often using neuropharmacological terminology to describe the nicotine experience, participants infused jargon such as ‘dopamine’ and ‘tolerance’ with their own embodied experiences of the temporality and pleasures of vape use. Our participants described ‘head spins’ as repeatedly visiting a state of fleeing intoxication to both transform and cope with everyday life.