I have a friend who has been using an e-cigarette for 10+ years. He doesn’t seem any less addicted to smoking as back when he was using old-fashioned cigarettes.
I understand e-cigarettes are supposed to help you quit… but has anyone actually had success with them? Or, is it more like trading one vice for another?
I managed to quit smoking by vaping about 6 years ago. For the most part a cigarette is a cigarette, but I was buying juice so I could control the level of nicotine. Started at 12, then to 6, 3 and finally 1.5 strength. Took about a year.
When I was at 1.5 I had a real bad chest cold so I put it down, never picked it back up. Vaping really helped me because I could quit without withdrawal of any kind. I worry about the prefilled convenience store pods because it doesn’t seem like you get that level of control to ween yourself off the nicotine.
I found this question surprising. “Do they work?” At first I didn’t understand - work at what? Then I realized that you’re thinking of them as quitting smoking devices. They’re not that. It’s an alternative to smoking. You inhale fewer particulates but often more nicotine, and there have been some health questions about the oils that serve as a medium for the nicotine and how healthy they are to inhale. It’s not thoroughly understood yet and there’s a big range of products out there.
The companies that sell them will swear up and down that they are to help you quit. And some users of them will tell you how much healthier it is and how they’re halfway to quitting. This is all, essentially, lies that they are telling themselves and you.
If you want to see a nicotine abatement product, check out nicotine gum or patches. There is nothing enjoyable about them. They allow the user to divide quitting into two stages: first, getting the habit out of their system, and second, phasing out their nicotine addiction. They do not deliver any enjoyment or rush, and are designed to be clinical and dull. The gum is hard and has a medicine flavor and plain grey color.
E-cigs on the other hand, enhance smoking. They allow you to smoke in more places. They add fruity flavors. The gadgets are cool and the different things you fill them with are stylishly presented. You still go through most of the motions of smoking and you’re getting more nicotine than before.
Why would anyone consider that a quitting tool? It absolutely is not.
and there have been some health questions about the oils that serve as a medium for the nicotine and how healthy they are to inhale.
Yeah, by fear mongering satanic panic moms and by monied interests
Nicotine vapes are orders of magnitude more safe than cigarettes. All the research shows it, and the medical establishment is full of cowards with “vapes lead to cigarettes” bullshit.
The only harmful vape chemicals (on any scale close to cigarettes) are sketchy fake weed from China. 100% of the popcorn lung cases stem from that.
There’s also sketchy fake vape juice from China. A huge amount of disposable vapes (elfbar etc) for sale are counterfeit. Who knows what they’re filled with.
a Mayo Clinic study published in The New England Journal of Medicine finds that lung injuries from vaping most likely are caused by direct toxicity or tissue damage from noxious chemical fumes.
…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported more than 800 lung injury cases that are associated with electronic cigarette use, or vaping, over the past few months. Twelve deaths have been confirmed in 10 states
Yeah, and it’s all from bullshit THC additive stuff. Not from nicotine vaping. If I add rat poison to my apple juice, it doesn’t mean apple juice is harmful.
This is the shit I’m talking about, conflating harmful with not harmful.
Mayo Clinic says, in the link I posted, that a good proportion of cases they’ve handled had THC additives, but not all. And they repeat what I said earlier: that it is not well understood but there are signs of trouble. They link to another panic mom / monied interest, the American Lung Association, who say:
A study from the University of North Carolina found that the two primary ingredients found in e-cigarettes—propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin—are toxic to cells and that the more ingredients in an e-liquid, the greater the toxicity.2
E-cigarettes produce a number of dangerous chemicals including acetaldehyde, acrolein, and formaldehyde. These aldehydes can cause lung disease, as well as cardiovascular (heart) disease.3
E-cigarettes also contain acrolein, a herbicide primarily used to kill weeds. It can cause acute lung injury and COPD and may cause asthma and lung cancer.4
Both the U.S. Surgeon General and the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine have warned about the risks of inhaling secondhand e-cigarette emissions, which are created when an e-cigarette user exhales the chemical cocktail created by e-cigarettes.
In 2016, the Surgeon General concluded that secondhand emissions contain, “nicotine; ultrafine particles; flavorings such as diacetyl, a chemical linked to serious lung disease; volatile organic compounds such as benzene, which is found in car exhaust; and heavy metals, such as nickel, tin, and lead.”
The Food and Drug Administration has not found any e-cigarette to be safe and effective in helping smokers quit. If smokers are ready to quit smoking for good, they should call 1-800-QUIT NOW or talk with their doctor about finding the best way to quit using proven methods and FDA-approved treatments and counseling.
People HAVE used them to quit successfully though. You can keep lowering the nicotine levels on them slowly in a similar manner as the nicotine gum and patches and it tends to be cheaper.
What I see are anecdotes about people who vaped and then quit. FDA has said they find no evidence that vaping improves outcomes for people trying to quit. There are other proven therapies, too, that don’t have all the health risks.
I also see a lot of anecdotes right here from people who switched to vaping and then did not quit.
The bottom line is that vaping may or may not have played a part in this or that person’s story, but there is no firm basis to hold it up as a quitting aid. So we should stop doing that.
No offense, but as someone from outside of the US, the FDA is not the sole speaker of what is safe or what helps addiction. You guys have a LOT of commonly consumed things that are outright banned in other countries.
While vaping specifically isn’t mentioned as a cessation-aid, my country states that “nicotine is approved for use in nicotine replacement therapies, (e.g. the patch, inhaler or nicotine gum) to ease withdrawal symptoms and help people quit smoking.” Research is ongoing, of course.
They don’t do shit for me. I could vape an entire cart and still want a cigarette just as much, if not more, than before I used the e-cig. The nicotine gum did a better job of curbing my cravings for a cigarette. So did Prozac; but that was given to me for depression and also gave me ED, so I mean… You wanna quit smoking or you want a working penis? You can choose 1. 😖
Why do people care so much if I have a vice? Why is everyone up my ass on this? I like nicotine, I’m sure your friend does too. They do not need more of a reason.
It can help, yes. But if you don’t want to quit, it will just be trading one for the other.
What I can say is that vaping is at the very least, less harmful than cigarettes. You don’t get a lot of the combustion by-products you do with cigarettes.
It’s not less addictive, and I’m not going to claim it’s healthier, just less harmful. Addiction to nicotine in any form is still an addition. Vaping doesn’t do anything different than cigarettes when it comes to nicotine. Its still an addictive substance, and the only real benefit you get from vaping (in terms of quitting) is detailed control over the concentration of nicotine in what you’re ingesting. This won’t matter if instead of vaping for 5 minutes per hour at 6mg, you’re vaping 10 minutes per hour at 3mg.
In the end, it’s entirely up to you. Vaping is a tool that can give you the control to accomplish the task of quitting, if that’s what you’re intending to do. If you’re just looking for something less harmful, but don’t have the drive to actually try to quit, it’s just going to substitute one for the other.
Well said. I’d managed to quit from cigarettes using a salt nic vape. It was a bit involved though. I learned how to make my own e-juice and properly dose nicotine (very important!). I titrated my dose down gradually over about 6 months until I was off nicotine. And then kicked the oral fixation by making a conscious effort to vape less. It worked alright for me. I wound up picking up the habit again a couple of years later after going through an extended period of shit just going wrong. Trouble is, I can’t do what I did last time because you can no longer order concentrated nicotine through the mail anymore. At least in the US
yep, legislation for the children is basically restricting a lot of high concentration stuff from being ordered at all.
Where I am (canada), we can’t get anything over 20mg/ml at all, unless we have a manufacturing license to buy anything higher. There are some shops that make their own e-juice that can mix whatever concentration you need. Here, that would be dashvapes in Toronto (though I’m sure they’re not the only one), and will go down to as little as 0.5mg/ml IIRC, since they have a manufacturing license and they have the high concentration liquid to mix it as much, or as little as they want.
I’ve been more or less stuck at 3mg for a while myself, I refuse to go higher, I just need to restrict how often I pick up the vape to get anywhere, since the oral fixation is very real and keeps me reaching for my vape… that’s the bit I need to get under control.
Honestly, as a smoker, it’s a godsend. The smoke goes away so quickly, it has higher nicotine than cigarettes when purchased the RIGHT way, and since I can now smoke inside, I can puff on it all day every day as I work from home!
In all seriousness, it’s worse imo. It sets the precedent from the 50s of smoking EVERYWHERE and now without any of the negative outward effects like smell or yellowing of the teeth/walls.
It’s honestly made my addiction worse. To each their own for sure, but in my experience it just made my bad habit SLIGHTLY healthier, but much more accessible.
It requires a significant amount of willpower to break the addiction, but for those of us that do not, definitely do not pick this up. It will not help. If you have that willpower, it is useful.
Estimates put out after research by Public Health England suggest that vaping is 95% better for you than smoking. So unless you’re vaping 20x more than you were smoking you’re probably benefitting.
It seems useful for people who were addicted to cigarettes by providing a potentially less harmful alternative.
But, for the generation that didn’t have addiction to cigarettes prior to E cigarettes I wonder how many went on to pick up the addiction to nicotine they otherwise wouldn’t have, since smoking cigarettes seemed to be going out of style.
I do kind of wonder what the endgame of addictive product development is. I mean, if you assume that technology can both reduce negative side effects and make the product more-potently-addictive, absent some sort of social movement or something opposed to them, I would think that we would get closer to a point where there is stupendously-addictive stuff that has no intrinsic harm other than the addiction itself, but that the addiction could be crippling and extremely hard to kick.
Wireheading is a term associated with fictional or futuristic applications of brain stimulation reward, the act of directly triggering the brain’s reward center by electrical stimulation of an inserted wire, for the purpose of ‘short-circuiting’ the brain’s normal reward process and artificially inducing pleasure. Scientists have successfully performed brain stimulation reward on rats (1950s) and humans (1960s). This stimulation does not appear to lead to tolerance or satiation in the way that sex or drugs do. The term is sometimes associated with science fiction writer Larry Niven, who used the term in his Known Space series. In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the term is used to refer to AI systems that hack their own reward channel.
Wireheading, like other forms of brain alteration, is often treated as dystopian in science fiction literature.
In Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, a “wirehead” is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant known as a “droud” in order to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brain. Wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting their basic needs in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of humanity without self-control.
Use your willpower in a small burst to buy a low nicotine juice and literally throw away the high nicotine stuff. You need to actually toss it and never use it again. Yes, it costs money, but do you want to quit or not?
Now use the low nicotine juice for a set amount of time (say, a month) and then switch to zero nicotine juice. Try to keep the same flavors you’re used to already.
Eventually you will stop smoking because youre only getting the positive feelings from the habit itself and not the nicotine.
There are tons of harmful chemicals and tar you aren’t inhaling by vaping, instead of by combustion with traditional cigarettes. Not sure if they’re worse.
You could also argue that that doesn’t apply to everyone. I treat vaping like it’s smoking, and I have from the start.
On the health side, I don’t want other people to be exposed to my bad choices either in public or residential buildings. So, I only vape when I am far away from others out of respect for them.
From another angle, I don’t enjoy the residue buildup that would happen over time. Imagine that stuff building up on your walls, in your PC, on your counters and cabinets, etc. The vapour you exhale doesn’t evaporate like steam in the sense that it isn’t water.
I think it might be an individual thing. You have the choice whether or not you treat it like a cigarette. It sucks going outside in poor weather, but it makes me actually want to quit more.
It’s not though. Your inhaling nicotine - which does not cause cancer or any other health issues - and water vapor. Probably burns your throat which can’t be too great, but no internal damage except from the mental standpoint of addiction.
Quick correction: the base isn’t water, it’s a combination of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine. Barring sensitivities, these are GRAS—Generally Recognized As Safe for human consumption.
Source: I make joose.
PS: Stay away from any flavours containing diacetyl.
Honestly I’m not yet in that camp. Sure for short term it is for a fact much better than analog smokes, but we know nothing of the long term.
Gotta remember: for quite a while, doctors recommended cigarettes. Sure tech and general knowledge have improved drastically since then, but the method of proving a hypothesis is still done the same way: testing.
I hope it is better. Maybe I’m just getting jaded in my age.
I quit smoking with them but it was more about harm reduction for me. They’re obviously less healthy than not using it at all, but everyone I know who quit smoking using an ecig has their own anecdotes about how they felt better after switching. I used to get bronchitis flare ups every flu season but that hasn’t happened since I switched. I don’t cough up crud all the time, I can climb stairs without getting winded, and I smell like fruit instead of cigarette butts which I’m sure everyone else appreciates. My nic level is also so low now I’m basically just vaping flavored vegetable glycerin.
Agreed. I know my technophile brain would take the reins if I made the vaping solution a gadgety one, so I deep-dived on vape rigs and pored over countless forums to find specifically what I was looking for in a cessation tool. At first, I kept it with me at all times, puffing whenever I felt the slightest urge, but soon put a little pressure on myself to hold off each time. Then, a little longer. Over the course of a single winter, I went from a half a pack a day habit to not a single cigarette and absentmindedly forgetting the vape rig at home. Another few months, and I noticed it sitting on my desk next to my monitor when I was tidying up and it actually had the tiniest bit of dust on it. I’ve since gifted the whole setup to a friend to help her quit, and she’s just recently gifted it to a neighbor with the same goal.
Worth every penny. Fuck lung cancer, and everything else that goes with a smoking addiction.
The correct answer is: It heavily depends on your individual circumstances. There is behaviours that are difficult to change. And there is nicotine, which is quite addictive. Some people can change things quite easily, while it’s next to impossible for other people.
Vaping should come with far less health risks than smoking. you don’t smell and your lung capacity gets to a normal level if you get from smoking to vaping.
So either your friend is for example addicted to nicotine. Or their intention is something else than quitting this. Maybe they like e-cigarettes and don’t see a reason to get rid of it. You’d have to ask them if they’re even trying to quit.
I switched to vaping because I’d just met my now wife and she hated the smell of smoke and all the associated stuff that goes with it, partly because she’d just come out of a bad relationship with a chain smoker but also because it’s just not nice for non smokers anyway.
That was about 10 years ago and I still vape. I’m will aware that I’ve just swapped one addiction for another but I don’t consider myself a smoker - haven’t touched a cigarette since, and genuinely never wanted to for a very long time now. My lungs still feel a lot better, I can run and do excercise without feeling like my lungs are imploding.
A lot of the studies done on vaping it should be noted use old fashioned kit and unrealistic use case scenarios (such testing until a coil gives out - a coil would usually last someone at least a week) -but even taking that into account I’ll take my chances with vaping. I tried all the other methods of giving up smoking and none of them worked for me so this is the closest.
As I side note, I am against disposable vapes and think the law should crack down on sales to underage people. A solution would be to only sell in established vape shops and require ID with every sale. I’m not naturally hard-line about this sort of thing but the school vaping thing is well out of control and is need of sorting out
Vapes are a good replacement for smoking for a lot of people, and it does do a lot less harm to your lungs. It didn’t work for me at all though, vaping really messes with my lungs, every time I pick it up I get chronic bronchitis. I know a lot of people who quit smoking by vaping, but not any people who quit vaping afterwards.
I actually just made the experience worse and worse without adjusting the nicotine. Switched to unflavored, then switched to freebase, then my vape broke and I started using my shitty old vape. It became a chore to smoke so it was easy to stop.
Although, I’ve usually been pretty good at controlling my nicotine when needed, so I would not describe myself as some highly addicted even when I was vaping a lot.
There’s two types of nicotine used in vapes freebase and salts. When vaping first started everything was freebase. In my experience it’s a slower come up and doesn’t hit as strong. Although I prefer freebase. Nicotine salts are easy to over do.
Huh, never knew that. Always just seen nicotine as nicotine. Usually when I hear freebase when referring to a substance as smoked though, it is typically cocaine lol
Keep in mind that ALSO comes in a salt form, which is the typical powder you see.
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I managed to quit smoking by vaping about 6 years ago. For the most part a cigarette is a cigarette, but I was buying juice so I could control the level of nicotine. Started at 12, then to 6, 3 and finally 1.5 strength. Took about a year.
When I was at 1.5 I had a real bad chest cold so I put it down, never picked it back up. Vaping really helped me because I could quit without withdrawal of any kind. I worry about the prefilled convenience store pods because it doesn’t seem like you get that level of control to ween yourself off the nicotine.
I found this question surprising. “Do they work?” At first I didn’t understand - work at what? Then I realized that you’re thinking of them as quitting smoking devices. They’re not that. It’s an alternative to smoking. You inhale fewer particulates but often more nicotine, and there have been some health questions about the oils that serve as a medium for the nicotine and how healthy they are to inhale. It’s not thoroughly understood yet and there’s a big range of products out there.
The companies that sell them will swear up and down that they are to help you quit. And some users of them will tell you how much healthier it is and how they’re halfway to quitting. This is all, essentially, lies that they are telling themselves and you.
If you want to see a nicotine abatement product, check out nicotine gum or patches. There is nothing enjoyable about them. They allow the user to divide quitting into two stages: first, getting the habit out of their system, and second, phasing out their nicotine addiction. They do not deliver any enjoyment or rush, and are designed to be clinical and dull. The gum is hard and has a medicine flavor and plain grey color.
E-cigs on the other hand, enhance smoking. They allow you to smoke in more places. They add fruity flavors. The gadgets are cool and the different things you fill them with are stylishly presented. You still go through most of the motions of smoking and you’re getting more nicotine than before.
Why would anyone consider that a quitting tool? It absolutely is not.
Yeah, by fear mongering satanic panic moms and by monied interests
Nicotine vapes are orders of magnitude more safe than cigarettes. All the research shows it, and the medical establishment is full of cowards with “vapes lead to cigarettes” bullshit.
The only harmful vape chemicals (on any scale close to cigarettes) are sketchy fake weed from China. 100% of the popcorn lung cases stem from that.
Actually the popcorn lung was traced back to one dude in LA who used a thickening agent to make his THC liquid seem thiccc.
There’s also sketchy fake vape juice from China. A huge amount of disposable vapes (elfbar etc) for sale are counterfeit. Who knows what they’re filled with.
Panic moms like… the Mayo Clinic?
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/vaping-associated-lung-injury-may-be-caused-by-toxic-chemical-fumes-study-fines/
…
Yeah, and it’s all from bullshit THC additive stuff. Not from nicotine vaping. If I add rat poison to my apple juice, it doesn’t mean apple juice is harmful.
This is the shit I’m talking about, conflating harmful with not harmful.
Mayo Clinic says, in the link I posted, that a good proportion of cases they’ve handled had THC additives, but not all. And they repeat what I said earlier: that it is not well understood but there are signs of trouble. They link to another panic mom / monied interest, the American Lung Association, who say:
People HAVE used them to quit successfully though. You can keep lowering the nicotine levels on them slowly in a similar manner as the nicotine gum and patches and it tends to be cheaper.
What I see are anecdotes about people who vaped and then quit. FDA has said they find no evidence that vaping improves outcomes for people trying to quit. There are other proven therapies, too, that don’t have all the health risks.
I also see a lot of anecdotes right here from people who switched to vaping and then did not quit.
The bottom line is that vaping may or may not have played a part in this or that person’s story, but there is no firm basis to hold it up as a quitting aid. So we should stop doing that.
No offense, but as someone from outside of the US, the FDA is not the sole speaker of what is safe or what helps addiction. You guys have a LOT of commonly consumed things that are outright banned in other countries.
While vaping specifically isn’t mentioned as a cessation-aid, my country states that “nicotine is approved for use in nicotine replacement therapies, (e.g. the patch, inhaler or nicotine gum) to ease withdrawal symptoms and help people quit smoking.” Research is ongoing, of course.
I’ll listen to mine, you listen to yours.
I happen to agree with you. I don’t consider the FDA perfect, just several degrees more reliable than internet anecdotes.
Because so many of us have quit using them, as you can ween yourself off of the nicotine with lower and lower concentrations.
They don’t do shit for me. I could vape an entire cart and still want a cigarette just as much, if not more, than before I used the e-cig. The nicotine gum did a better job of curbing my cravings for a cigarette. So did Prozac; but that was given to me for depression and also gave me ED, so I mean… You wanna quit smoking or you want a working penis? You can choose 1. 😖
Vaping disposables or salt nic devices did nothing for me. I had to have a mod that actually delivered a punch.
Oh yes, they work. Got off cigs OVERNIGHT years ago. Still vape because now I love the fantastical fruity flavors and have a fixation.
Why do people care so much if I have a vice? Why is everyone up my ass on this? I like nicotine, I’m sure your friend does too. They do not need more of a reason.
It can help, yes. But if you don’t want to quit, it will just be trading one for the other.
What I can say is that vaping is at the very least, less harmful than cigarettes. You don’t get a lot of the combustion by-products you do with cigarettes.
It’s not less addictive, and I’m not going to claim it’s healthier, just less harmful. Addiction to nicotine in any form is still an addition. Vaping doesn’t do anything different than cigarettes when it comes to nicotine. Its still an addictive substance, and the only real benefit you get from vaping (in terms of quitting) is detailed control over the concentration of nicotine in what you’re ingesting. This won’t matter if instead of vaping for 5 minutes per hour at 6mg, you’re vaping 10 minutes per hour at 3mg.
In the end, it’s entirely up to you. Vaping is a tool that can give you the control to accomplish the task of quitting, if that’s what you’re intending to do. If you’re just looking for something less harmful, but don’t have the drive to actually try to quit, it’s just going to substitute one for the other.
Well said. I’d managed to quit from cigarettes using a salt nic vape. It was a bit involved though. I learned how to make my own e-juice and properly dose nicotine (very important!). I titrated my dose down gradually over about 6 months until I was off nicotine. And then kicked the oral fixation by making a conscious effort to vape less. It worked alright for me. I wound up picking up the habit again a couple of years later after going through an extended period of shit just going wrong. Trouble is, I can’t do what I did last time because you can no longer order concentrated nicotine through the mail anymore. At least in the US
yep, legislation for the children is basically restricting a lot of high concentration stuff from being ordered at all.
Where I am (canada), we can’t get anything over 20mg/ml at all, unless we have a manufacturing license to buy anything higher. There are some shops that make their own e-juice that can mix whatever concentration you need. Here, that would be dashvapes in Toronto (though I’m sure they’re not the only one), and will go down to as little as 0.5mg/ml IIRC, since they have a manufacturing license and they have the high concentration liquid to mix it as much, or as little as they want.
I’ve been more or less stuck at 3mg for a while myself, I refuse to go higher, I just need to restrict how often I pick up the vape to get anywhere, since the oral fixation is very real and keeps me reaching for my vape… that’s the bit I need to get under control.
Hey! Me too! :) Loved making my own ejuice… That SUCKS about the mailing restriction :(
Current e-cig user here.
Honestly, as a smoker, it’s a godsend. The smoke goes away so quickly, it has higher nicotine than cigarettes when purchased the RIGHT way, and since I can now smoke inside, I can puff on it all day every day as I work from home!
In all seriousness, it’s worse imo. It sets the precedent from the 50s of smoking EVERYWHERE and now without any of the negative outward effects like smell or yellowing of the teeth/walls.
It’s honestly made my addiction worse. To each their own for sure, but in my experience it just made my bad habit SLIGHTLY healthier, but much more accessible.
It requires a significant amount of willpower to break the addiction, but for those of us that do not, definitely do not pick this up. It will not help. If you have that willpower, it is useful.
Same situation here, vape more than I used to smoke.
Only concern I have is long term affects, since we don’t actually know what they are yet.
Estimates put out after research by Public Health England suggest that vaping is 95% better for you than smoking. So unless you’re vaping 20x more than you were smoking you’re probably benefitting.
It seems useful for people who were addicted to cigarettes by providing a potentially less harmful alternative.
But, for the generation that didn’t have addiction to cigarettes prior to E cigarettes I wonder how many went on to pick up the addiction to nicotine they otherwise wouldn’t have, since smoking cigarettes seemed to be going out of style.
I do kind of wonder what the endgame of addictive product development is. I mean, if you assume that technology can both reduce negative side effects and make the product more-potently-addictive, absent some sort of social movement or something opposed to them, I would think that we would get closer to a point where there is stupendously-addictive stuff that has no intrinsic harm other than the addiction itself, but that the addiction could be crippling and extremely hard to kick.
Science fiction has explored the concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_%28science_fiction%29
Use your willpower in a small burst to buy a low nicotine juice and literally throw away the high nicotine stuff. You need to actually toss it and never use it again. Yes, it costs money, but do you want to quit or not?
Now use the low nicotine juice for a set amount of time (say, a month) and then switch to zero nicotine juice. Try to keep the same flavors you’re used to already.
Eventually you will stop smoking because youre only getting the positive feelings from the habit itself and not the nicotine.
There are tons of harmful chemicals and tar you aren’t inhaling by vaping, instead of by combustion with traditional cigarettes. Not sure if they’re worse.
Being that I now vape from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed simply due to accessibility, I’d say it’s worse.
Is vaping worse, or are you?
You could also argue that that doesn’t apply to everyone. I treat vaping like it’s smoking, and I have from the start.
On the health side, I don’t want other people to be exposed to my bad choices either in public or residential buildings. So, I only vape when I am far away from others out of respect for them.
From another angle, I don’t enjoy the residue buildup that would happen over time. Imagine that stuff building up on your walls, in your PC, on your counters and cabinets, etc. The vapour you exhale doesn’t evaporate like steam in the sense that it isn’t water.
I think it might be an individual thing. You have the choice whether or not you treat it like a cigarette. It sucks going outside in poor weather, but it makes me actually want to quit more.
It’s not though. Your inhaling nicotine - which does not cause cancer or any other health issues - and water vapor. Probably burns your throat which can’t be too great, but no internal damage except from the mental standpoint of addiction.
Quick correction: the base isn’t water, it’s a combination of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine. Barring sensitivities, these are GRAS—Generally Recognized As Safe for human consumption.
Source: I make joose.
PS: Stay away from any flavours containing diacetyl.
Honestly I’m not yet in that camp. Sure for short term it is for a fact much better than analog smokes, but we know nothing of the long term.
Gotta remember: for quite a while, doctors recommended cigarettes. Sure tech and general knowledge have improved drastically since then, but the method of proving a hypothesis is still done the same way: testing.
I hope it is better. Maybe I’m just getting jaded in my age.
I quit smoking with them but it was more about harm reduction for me. They’re obviously less healthy than not using it at all, but everyone I know who quit smoking using an ecig has their own anecdotes about how they felt better after switching. I used to get bronchitis flare ups every flu season but that hasn’t happened since I switched. I don’t cough up crud all the time, I can climb stairs without getting winded, and I smell like fruit instead of cigarette butts which I’m sure everyone else appreciates. My nic level is also so low now I’m basically just vaping flavored vegetable glycerin.
I was only able to quit smoking, because I replaced it with Vaping. Quitting vaping was way easier than quitting smoking.
Went from 1 cigarette every hour, to maybe 1 cigarette a year (when I get drunk with my friends during a wedding or something)
And I quit vaping.
So yes, in my case, vaping absolutely helped.
Agreed. I know my technophile brain would take the reins if I made the vaping solution a gadgety one, so I deep-dived on vape rigs and pored over countless forums to find specifically what I was looking for in a cessation tool. At first, I kept it with me at all times, puffing whenever I felt the slightest urge, but soon put a little pressure on myself to hold off each time. Then, a little longer. Over the course of a single winter, I went from a half a pack a day habit to not a single cigarette and absentmindedly forgetting the vape rig at home. Another few months, and I noticed it sitting on my desk next to my monitor when I was tidying up and it actually had the tiniest bit of dust on it. I’ve since gifted the whole setup to a friend to help her quit, and she’s just recently gifted it to a neighbor with the same goal.
Worth every penny. Fuck lung cancer, and everything else that goes with a smoking addiction.
The correct answer is: It heavily depends on your individual circumstances. There is behaviours that are difficult to change. And there is nicotine, which is quite addictive. Some people can change things quite easily, while it’s next to impossible for other people.
Vaping should come with far less health risks than smoking. you don’t smell and your lung capacity gets to a normal level if you get from smoking to vaping.
So either your friend is for example addicted to nicotine. Or their intention is something else than quitting this. Maybe they like e-cigarettes and don’t see a reason to get rid of it. You’d have to ask them if they’re even trying to quit.
They’re not inherently “supposed to help you quit”. That’s only if you use them with that superficial intention.
They certainly allow you to reduce or remove nicotine intake - because you can change the fluid.
I switched to vaping because I’d just met my now wife and she hated the smell of smoke and all the associated stuff that goes with it, partly because she’d just come out of a bad relationship with a chain smoker but also because it’s just not nice for non smokers anyway.
That was about 10 years ago and I still vape. I’m will aware that I’ve just swapped one addiction for another but I don’t consider myself a smoker - haven’t touched a cigarette since, and genuinely never wanted to for a very long time now. My lungs still feel a lot better, I can run and do excercise without feeling like my lungs are imploding.
A lot of the studies done on vaping it should be noted use old fashioned kit and unrealistic use case scenarios (such testing until a coil gives out - a coil would usually last someone at least a week) -but even taking that into account I’ll take my chances with vaping. I tried all the other methods of giving up smoking and none of them worked for me so this is the closest.
As I side note, I am against disposable vapes and think the law should crack down on sales to underage people. A solution would be to only sell in established vape shops and require ID with every sale. I’m not naturally hard-line about this sort of thing but the school vaping thing is well out of control and is need of sorting out
Vapes are a good replacement for smoking for a lot of people, and it does do a lot less harm to your lungs. It didn’t work for me at all though, vaping really messes with my lungs, every time I pick it up I get chronic bronchitis. I know a lot of people who quit smoking by vaping, but not any people who quit vaping afterwards.
E-cigarettes is designed to replace cigarettes nowadays, not to help you quit smoking.
Most of them are actually cigarettes company subsidiary, just look up some f1 sponsor and you will find them.
If you use them that way. You can also dial down the nicotine in them to zero to wean yourself off of it.
That’s what I did after 5 years of vaping. Gradually went down to 0.5% nic and finally quit in May.
Congrats! Good for you! That’s so hard to do.
I actually just made the experience worse and worse without adjusting the nicotine. Switched to unflavored, then switched to freebase, then my vape broke and I started using my shitty old vape. It became a chore to smoke so it was easy to stop.
Although, I’ve usually been pretty good at controlling my nicotine when needed, so I would not describe myself as some highly addicted even when I was vaping a lot.
Mfer are you smoking crack?
There’s two types of nicotine used in vapes freebase and salts. When vaping first started everything was freebase. In my experience it’s a slower come up and doesn’t hit as strong. Although I prefer freebase. Nicotine salts are easy to over do.
Huh, never knew that. Always just seen nicotine as nicotine. Usually when I hear freebase when referring to a substance as smoked though, it is typically cocaine lol
Keep in mind that ALSO comes in a salt form, which is the typical powder you see.
I don’t think he is…
They help you stop smoking. In my experience they don’t help you quit nicotine, they just manufactured all the joy out of it.