at the equivalent rate of a 9/11 attack every three days didn’t faze Pyne in the least. While Vice President Grimes was fighting for his country, Pyne fought to keep tobacco addictive and profitable.
His success in dealing with unconstitutional decrees from the government caught the attention of the budding vaping industry and Pyne was offered lucrative stock incentives to draft the strategy to deal with emerging federal regulations from the Food and Drug Administration and backlash from do-gooder groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the American Cancer Society. Big Tobacco acquired controlling stakes in the leading vape companies early on, infusing them with capital for growth. They recognized the small electronic devices with candy flavored liquid smoke were a gateway to their tobacco products and an opportunity to co-opt the next generation of customers.
Pyne managed to hold off regulation and a government-mandated review of vaping’s health impact as long as he could among an avalanche of increasingly devastating evidence. He’d been involved in D.C. lobbying long enough to know when it was time to abandon ship. The writing was on the wall. The multibillion-dollar e-cigarette industry was about to be regulated into submission. Pyne took his money and ran for an even more distasteful occupation: political operative.
Although his salary peddling cigarettes and the windfall of exercising his e-cigarette stock options in the vaping industry put him into what was increasingly referred to as the “one percent,” Pyne was still an outsider. The families that controlled the tobacco and vaping companies had the homes, the cars, the jets, the multiple ex-wives, and the art collections. They had their names plastered over everything from university chairs to the wings of world-renowned museums. In both instances, Pyne once again felt left behind, a hired gun to be kept content with leftovers from the plates of royalty. Where would they be without him slogging through painful media training, reading depositions, being deposed, and sitting through state and federal congressional testimony?
He’d thought the newer and hipper e-cigarette company would welcome him into the clubs and parties he’d yearned for since his youth. It turned out that the gates to the kingdom were guarded by the same old boys’ network that had plagued him all his life. They just wanted him to work the same magic on vaping that he had on tobacco and then go home. After discovering that money alone was not enough to open the coveted door, Pyne had given notice and exercised his stock options. On the way out, he leaked an internal memo on the company’s advertising practices and an independent medical study on what was intended to show the benefits of vaping as an alternative to combustible smoking. The marketing memo clearly outlined the promotion of candy flavorings via social media marketing campaigns targeting children. The medical study warned that because the vape liquid contained lipoid components and toxins, when heated they caused an acute chemical inhalation injury to the lungs, or as a federal lawmaker whose daughter had died at a college party after vaping with friends stated, “It poisons and kills our kids from the inside out. This is murder.”
Pyne had gotten out just in time, leaving those at the company to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic as it headed for the inevitable. His memo and medical study, leaked to New York regulators and a producer at 60 Minutes, along with a New England Journal of Medicine study on vaping-induced lung injuries, ensured the opioid epidemic was quickly replaced by outrage levelled against the beleaguered vaping companies. Say what you would about opioids, at least they’d never concocted a branding strategy around addicting children to their products. They specifically aimed their deadly prescription drugs at adults.
Reginald Pyne had grown up one of the worst kind of impoverished, a working-class kid in a sea of wealth. Even as a child he insisted on being called Reginald. When his classmates found out how particular he was, they tormented him by bestowing him with the nickname “Reggie-boy,” a name he detested. His father had been a firefighter until a devastating injury almost killed him. After the accident, the Pynes continued to live in what had turned into an exclusive enclave of New York, although across the border in neighboring Connecticut. His mother combined her meager salary working at the front desk of the very prep school Reginald attended with her husband’s disability checks to make ends meet. Her position at the school