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?
Depends - it can be used to quit by controlling and lowering the nicotine content, but it could just be used as a harm reduction method.
While certainly not healthy, it’s significantly much less bad for you than smoking.
Burnt cigarettes have over 9000 different chemicals, several of which are addictive MAOI antidepressants. It’s not the nicotine hooking people to the level we see in smokers, it’s that, they’re having legitimate withdrawal symptoms from a legitimate drug dependency. Nicotine itself at the levels anyone takes it in is maybe a little more addictive than caffeine.
Ecigs, at minimum, have propylene glycol (GRAS) and nicotine which isn’t necessarily from tobacco, and even the nicotine is optional. Many have a couple other ingredients like vegetable glycerine (makes “smoke” clouds puffier) and flavorings, but even loaded up it doesn’t compare to the count in the first paragraph. Ecigs also don’t burn anything unless you’re doing it very wrong.
Also since I’m on the soap box anyway, when you hear fear stories about “vaping” they’re usually lumping in thc/marijuana which is effectively different even though it doesn’t need to be. Because it’s regulated if not illegal you’ll chance getting things like adulterated cartridges with oils in them, if you breathe in oil particles you’re getting pneumonia. So when you’re reading or hearing about some scary story it’s probably that and the one “reporting” is too lazy or too ignorant to make the distinctions they should.
That was the vitamin E acetate shenanigans from a few years ago that people were cutting with THC concentrate to make it look thicker/more quality than it actually was. Huge disinformation campaign somehow made nicotine vapes the bad guy even though it was entirely unrelated
This is what I did. Started at a “normal” nicotine level, then once I was used to that level and wasn’t getting any cravings (took a few months usually) I would lower my nicotine strength a little bit then repeat the process. It made it way easier for me to quit once I did. I barely got any cravings.
I vape now. I used to smoke a lot. I agree it can be effective but the end result may not always be complete withdrawal from nicotine.
While certainly not healthy, it’s significantly much less bad for you than smoking.
It’s much better, tbh, aside from the health benefits vs cigarettes. The stench is no longer there - at worse, it’s just this annoying sweet smell. No more cig butts that you have to dispose of all the time - I know use “pods” which, if I’m stressed, I replace after 5-6 days. If anyone’s a smoker, I’d recommend to switch to vape. But if not, I’d suggest they stay away from vapes/nicotine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is vaping worse, or are you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
My husband just traded one for the other. We’d like to think it’s “healthier”, but who knows. Definitely stinks less which I appreciate.
I did the same thing, about eight years ago. By day three, I wasn’t coughing up phlegm anymore. By day five, I could climb stairs without getting winded. After about a year, my dentist told me that my gums were way healthier.
Is it beneficial, when compared to not doing it? Most probably not. Is it far less damaging than inhaling tobacco smoke? Absolutely.
Research shows it’s around 95% better than cigarettes.
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 :(
As someone who smoked a pack a day until last year and switched to an e-cigarette yeah, they can definitely be helpful in quitting. I have a few friends who switched over and slowly lowered the nicotine levels until they had non nicotine and kept it for the oral fixation. Personally I switched just because it’s a lot cheaper, and I don’t have plans to lower nicotine anytime soon, but I’ve even felt better using just the ecig compared to normal smokes.
It worked for me, but the intent was to quit. Your friend isn’t trying if it’s been more than a decade. I started at a higher nicotine, and slowly got lighter nicotine options. Once I got to 0 nicotine, it was mostly just breaking the physical desire to do something when my hands were free or while driving. I think I only bought one bottle of 0 nicotine and moved on.
Same, I switched from smoking to vaping a pretty high nicotine juice at the height of the vaping craze. Slowly worked my way down to 0 nicotine and finally was able to drop the vaping. I haven’t had a vape in over a year and haven’t had a cigarette in about 5 years. I still get cravings but they pass and I’m fine. I was a pack per day smoker for 20 years, e-cigs can absolutely help if your intent is to quit.
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.
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.
They are “supposed” to make quit burning tobacco. That’s where the harm is.
Nicotine alone does not cause cancer.He’s not smoking.
Pure nicotine is about as harmful as caffeine. Some people will want to quit it altogether, others find it useful. It’s all good.
According to my cardiologist, nicotine is the part of cigarette smoke that has a detrimental effect on the heart and arteries. Way more harmful than caffeine.
Make him give you the evidence. Here’s a systematic review of nicotine side effects and heres the RCP report on vaping.
Physicians who spread fear about vaping are killing people. They should go back to medical school and pay more attention in their epidemiology classes.
Physicians who spread fear about vaping are killing people.
A major point of that article is that the
health draftsdeaths from vaping in the US are caused by substances that are banned from the UK. So maybe doctors in the UK might be spreading false info, but it sounds like doctors in the US might have a point!That’s not true at all. There was one US cannabis outlet using vitamin E acetate as a diluent in error. It’s lethal when heated and not a standard component of any e-cigarette anywhere at all.
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It may not be true at all, but it’s in the source that you posted.
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Link your evidence and I will critique it. I can’t do anything with this hand-wavey nonsense.
There’s a lot of really terrible anti-vaping research out there (as there is in any field). Like the one that claimed vapers were more likely to have heart attacks which was withdrawn after reviewers and editors demanded they state which happened first, the vaping or the heart attack.
It is a difficult area to study, no doubt. If you’re relying on observational studies which show an association but cannot determine whether there is a causal arrow, or even which direction it points in, you need to be very careful about how you interpret it. You can’t rely on the authors or the headlines. Pub Peer is often a useful first port of call to find any concerns raised, a citation search is also useful.
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If you don’t care enough to have compiled the evidence, how can you justify expressing a strongly held opinion on a public forum? Just spew out any old bullshit headline as long as it confirms your prejudices? Regardless of how many millions of lives are on the line?
That’s not good enough. If you make a serious claim, back it up with your sources, or just don’t do it.
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You have no idea what you’re talking about and spreading misinformation. I developed brain cancer a while back. Ask the doc if I can vape. She says sure. Year later I can barely walk from the extreme nerve damage cause by the vape. And yes there are reasons why I’m 100% sure it’s the vape. Even Australia has a national ban on them. Yes they did help me to stop smoking but at a steep price. But no lol some random guy on the internet thinks he knows more than doctors, just like the vaccine denialists on Facebook. It would be ironic if it weren’t so fuckin sad.
“I farted and then it started raining. I’m 100% sure my fart made it rain”.
Yea nicotine is harmless lol, it’s almost as if they didn’t get caught lying to congress about that very thing they knew was a lie. And you’re repeating the shit for them, for free. climate change is harmless too. see how fucking stupid that sounds?
What the fuck are you on about.
I’m responding to a question with my personal experience. What the fuck are you on about?
I’m sorry you went through that but a temporal link is not causal evidence. There are millions of people convinced MMR vaccine caused their child’s autism too, but it did not.
Australia does have an extremely wrong-headed approach to vaping. It will kill millions.
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Yes. Pack a day + chain smoking when I drank. I used an ecig to quit. Over the course of about 7 years, (yeah, just like your friend!) 12mg then 9mg then 6, then 3, then 1.5, then 0. I stayed on 0 for awhile and then one day I got out the car at a store and my ecig must of hit the ground. I never saw it again. That was the day I finally quit for good. Been 3 years now.
If nothing else, ecigs are way less of a risk and way less of a diminisher to ones quality of life compared to analog cigarettes. There is no stank left on the user and the users clothes. There is no more hacking up a lung every morning. ecigs seem to not suppress the immune system as harshly as analog cigarettes either. ecigs are incredibly cheaper too.
There is a lot of propaganda out there, misinformation, being disseminated by “big tobacco” - cause they are losing and have lost A LOT of profits due to people switching to ecigs and quitting analog cigarettes. They’ve even lobbied governements to pass legislation restricting access to ecig materials - citing the same old bullshit line: “Won’t somebody think of the children!?! OH THE CHILDREN!!!”
It helps most in the sense that it’s not at all as unhealthy. Anything you hear to the contrary is simply scaremongering and terrible advice. Almost half of smokers die from smoking related illness where I live. The negative health effects and oxidative damage from pyrolysis and from vapourizing a liquid are simply not comparable.
They did for me. Smoked 20 years, vaped 3 years at increasingly lower nicotine levels, then quit. That was several years ago
You mean are they just as addictive? Yeah. Its just as big of a scam as cigarettes and a monumental waste of money.
I actually did quit using them. But it wasn’t a case of switching from cigs to vapes and then just quitting a few weeks later.
I smoked for over 30 years and then moved over to vaping. I then vaped for about 7 years before finally managing to quit. That was 557 days ago now.
I will say coming off the vapes did seem easier than coming off cigarettes which I’d never managed to do previously,
Whether the vapes actually helped me quit I can’t say for sure but when I was on them I didn’t stink of smoke and I’m sure they are probably more healthy than actual cigarettes and they’re much cheaper so I look at the time vaping as a positive comparatively speaking.
Congratulations!! I love it that you know exactly how many days.
The slightly slower onset of nicotine in the vape (compared to smoking) probably did make it a little easier to quit.
