Mike Dean, Liam McMullan on Plooms.

“I went to Wonderland and met Alice, and we went to a tea party with the Mad Hatter!”

Okay?

“This stuff is great, and you know, you can smoke other things besides tobacco inside of it,” the 28-year-old told us, winking at us and grinning like the Cheshire Cat. We were dubious of the validity (and health factor) of these claims, especially since Ploom, created by two Stanford grad students, worked like most vaporizers in the sense that it didn’t involve smoking anything: rather the device heated up and released a water vapor that, when blown out, resembled the trail of cigarette smoke.

Before venturing inside the non-smoke-filled room, we eyed The Village Voice’s Michael Musto loitering out on the sidewalk. Was watching all these kids light up making him nostalgic for the smoky bars of the pre-Giuliani era?

“No, but I miss the smell,” the columnist told us. “I miss waking up and not having that cigarette scent on all my clothes that let me know I was in a bar last night. Eau de Cancer.”

Inside, Kanye West producer Mike Dean stood with his model girlfriend, Louise Donegan, both of them thoughtfully puffing away on their respective Ploom’s. We asked if the two if they’d consider switching their favorite brands of cigarettes over for the e-version.

“You’re kind of catching me on a hiatus,” Ms. Donegan, an on-and-off Parliament smoker who had quit once before relapsing and was trying to quit again, told Transom. “These are interesting.”

“I feel like these are okay,” said Mr. Dean dubiously, a Marlboro man himself. As if by magic, a track from Watch the Throne came on.

“This album is really special to us, because I met Mike at the release party for it,” Ms. Donegan told us. Would she ever walk down the aisle to it?

“That’s not a bad idea,” she laughed.

To get a real review of how Ploom stacked up against the competition, we had to find someone who was already familiar with the Vaping scene.

“I’m a huge fan of e cigarettes,” said DJ Cory Kennedy, who claimed that she had gotten her friends and yes, even her mother hooked on vaporizers. (Her preferred brand is Blu.) “So when Ploom contacted me about tonight, I was like ‘How did they know?’”

But Ploom wasn’t exactly like an e-cigarette...at least not like the kind we were used to. Ploom’s mini-vape model contained little disposable “pods” (which several attendees described as like those “Nescafe espresso cups”) that had to be rotated out consistently, and the device itself seemed to run out of battery power over the course of an evening. (It needed to be refilled with butane, we found out later.) And it didn’t really taste like a cigarette either.

“It’s kind of got a tea aftertaste,” the DJ told us, before spitting something out in her hand. “I just got a chunk of some tea leaves or something sucked out,” she gasped. “Is that normal?”

E-cig vaping (Getty)

Good news for the vaping community! A new study, produced by the environmental health consulting firm CHANGE LLC, claims that the secondhand risks from e-cigarette vapors are minuscule, and we should all just be chill about co-workers using them in the office.

Study abstract:

Comparisons of pollutant concentrations were made between e-cigarette vapor and tobacco smoke samples. Pollutants included VOCs, carbonyls, PAHs, nicotine, TSNAs, and glycols. From these results, risk analyses were conducted based on dilution into a 40 m3 room and standard toxicological data. Non-cancer risk analysis revealed “No Significant Risk” of harm to human health for vapor samples from e-liquids (A-D).

Before we get too excited, the study was contracted for $100,000 by the National Vapers Club from solicited donations at Vaping Expos. And "non-cancer risk analysis" is sort of a shady term: does that mean that checking for the risk of cancer in secondhand vapors wasn't a factor in the study?

If we had to worry about tobacco lobbyists and spin doctors before, now we're facing a new breed of anti-smoking, pro-vaping flack. Like the website Liberty Flights, which has a bunch of very convincing quotes from doctors saying stuff like:

“This study demonstrates that the risks of secondhand vapor from electronic cigarette use are very small in comparison to those associated with secondhand tobacco smoke. While secondhand smoke must be eliminated in workplaces and public places, the current data provide no justification for eliminating electronic cigarette use in these places.” —Dr. Michael Siegel of Boston University School of Public Health

Except that Liberty Flights is a vaping company that "specialize[s] in quality Electronic cigarettes and e liquids as well as other accessories such as atomizers, cones, batteries, chargers, cases and mods." It also refers to the unregulated Chinese-produced nicotine liquid as "E juice," which frankly sounds a lot funner than what it actually is.

Look, we're not saying that this study is inherently biased. We're just saying we'd feel better if there was a study presented by a lab that wasn't being paid by an organization that has a stake in the outcome. It generally looks pretty good for the e-cig argument, but then again, the FCC still hasn't been allowed to conduct its own review, which keeps the relative potential risk factors in these products pretty much a question mark.

Meet Stephen Dwarf. (YouTube)

Do you remember that amazing Stephen Dorff "Behind the Scenes" infomercial for Blu-E Cigarettes? The one that was six minutes of rambling, apparently unedited footage of actor Stephen Dorff (Blade, FeardotCom, Space Truckers) wearing a silly hat and playing piano in someone's beach bungalow while taking e-cig breaks during a commercial for the Blu-U brand?

Well, one e-cigarette company decided to take it to the next level. Meet White Cloud Electronic Cigarettes’ newest spokesperson ... Stephen DWARF.

http://youtu.be/fNmxTdn7hC4

Like it wasn't sad enough that e-cigarettes are peddled by actors whose careers are so dead that the name of the spot was Stephen Dorff's "Rise From the Ashes." Can you imagine the conversation with the ad team for this one? Like one exec came in all excited Monday morning and threw down the Stephen Dorff copy, announced, "You know what? We can make this better. All we need is a pun and a tiny man with a dream."

"You mean another Stephen Dorff spot? For a different brand?" Another of White Cloud's ad team would ask.

"No. I'm thinking bigger! How about Stephen DWARF?"

"That's technically smaller, and offensive."

"Johnson, that's exactly the kind of in-the-box thinking that keeps you from being called The Don Draper of e-cigarettes."

"No one is ever called that."

"People will, after they meet Stephen Dwarf."