Literally the worst idea. I quit vaping a while ago. Vaping made me, it gave me dopamine hits even when I got nothing done. Quitting has made me noticeably more focused, alert and let's me push myself harder. That feels great to me.
I've heard that you can get a "0%" vape that has no nicotine in it, but the vape shops I've asked have no idea what I'm talking about or why I'd want it. Any idea if that's real?
Yes this is and has always been an option. Find any real vape shop at any point in the past... _checks calendar_ 15 years at least, and they will sell you nearly any of their "e-juice" products with no nicotine.
Trick is, the companies making disposables vapes/pods/etc generally don't offer them because those are generally large tobacco and other companies and ... well, why would they manufacturer and sell a non-addictive cigarette when an addictive version exists.
0% nicotine was an option almost 20 years ago when I started vaping and is still available. The tobacco companies getting involved and polluting the streets with single use lithium ion batteries and shit have done nothing but made everything worse.
It's useful for quitting. A lot of smokers/vapers struggle with "oral fixation", ie needing something to do with their mouth. Gradually lowering your nicotine to 0% is a way to get off nicotine without having to face this problem at the same time.
It WAS useful for quitting, until the tobacco companies leveraged vaping as a skirt around the regulations on cigarettes. Now those wanting to using vaping as a method to reduce/stop smoking have to avoid getting addicted to vapes instead.
Also, vaping is fucking obnoxious for non smokers, clouds of awful smelling residue, and plastic shit everywhere. I'd rather people smoked, ideally those e-cigs that burn tobacco but cut out most of the toxins.
> ...vaping is fucking obnoxious for non smokers...
As a former smoker and non-smoker for a long time now, I disagree.
> ...clouds of awful smelling residue...
IME, most of the time it smells far better than cigarette smoke.
> ...and plastic shit everywhere.
Litterbugs are gonna litter, man. I know this because I live in a place with a very high concentration of them. Is the litterbug done with his drink, takeout, or other item that came in some disposable packaging? Is the trash can that's clearly visible from his current location more than two feet away? Then that packaging ends up directly on the sidewalk or tossed into the street.
Worse than that are litterbugs who are also dog owners. Their creed is "Pick up my dog's dogshit and put it in a trashcan? Hell no, fuck that, and fuck you!".
Yep, it exists. I tried it before, and it still felt as bad because of the smoke you're inhaling. Our lungs are extremely sensitive receptors and are pretty much supposed to interact with absolutely nothing else other than the air we breathe.
> ...it still felt as bad because of the smoke you're inhaling.
Unless you have an incredibly defective vaporizer, that "smoke" you're talking about is as much smoke as the "steam" in a hot shower is. If your vaporizer is producing smoke, you need to dispose of it and get one that doesn't set things on fire.
> Our lungs are extremely sensitive receptors and are pretty much supposed to interact with absolutely nothing else other than the air we breathe.
You might be astounded at how much junk is in the air we breathe, even in "clean" natural locations. Because the natural environment is so incredibly filthy and because the natural environment contains so many things that want to eat us (because -as it turns out- we're made of food!) our bodies are built to interact with and neutralize all sorts of contaminants.
This is so many orders of magnitude above the “good” AQI threshold that it’s almost comical.
Now, sure, different particles have different health characteristics, but the stuff coming out of a vape isn’t water, and you’d better hope that it is many orders of magnitude less damaging than the fine particles that are found in the environment if you actually want to believe that your lungs are prepared to handle it.
(Okay, it’s obviously orders of magnitude less damaging than, say, wildfire smoke or brake dust or restaurant kitchen exhaust on a per-microgram basis, but the question is how many orders of magnitude less dangerous.)
P.S. I strongly suspect that there is one common dry aerosol that is genuinely harmless in moderate amounts: sodium chloride from sea spray. It’s highly soluble and found all over inside your body. I’m not sure to what extent air quality impact studies try to separate out the AQI impact from sea spray from everything else.
That's how I quit cigarettes - got 0% liquids in a few flavours, hard-quit the smokes and puffed like crazy on a vape to assuage the habit. After around 3 months I noticed I'd stopped caring about the vapes so much and just put them down.
Worked well for me, might not work so well for others.
Personally I thought that was the whole deal with vapes, use them as a tool to beat the addiction to 'real' tobacco products, but it looks like the world proved me wrong on that one.
The next will be nicotine free tobacco. .. the leafs will be watered for a undisclosed amount of time to remove the nicotine as it's water soluble. It's like decaffeinated coffee - it's when you need this tastes but your heart can't take it anymore :)
If you can also keep the usual tobacco-processing chemicals and other additives out, is the bare leaf, nicotine-free, arguably no worse than other common vices ?
Generally I would say that burning(flame/smoldering) anything is bad for you. Even simplest hydrocarbons (methane, propane, butane) with imperfect combustion have negative effects. You can make it slightly better, but smoke is most likely always carcinogenic.
I once successfully quit smoking by buying a pack of cigarettes made with tobacco that had been cleansed of its nicotine. I bought them one evening on the way home from work.
That first night was rough because nicotine withdraw be like that. The second day was still not great, but it was easier. By the third day, I'd had enough. On about the fourth day, I threw the rest away because they were just tiresome.
They were lousy. They tasted terrible compared to my usual brand. And smoking them did nothing to quench my addiction-driven craving for nicotine -- the reward for my brain and my body simply wasn't being delivered.
And it worked.
---
My theory for the method of operation goes something like this:
My brain was used to pushing the button and receiving candy, and it needed that candy (or at least it thought that it did).
But this was disruptive of that: The button was still there and I could push it freely. But no matter how many times I pushed it, no candy was received. This went on just long enough that I no longer felt compelled to need candy (because nicotine addiction had enough time to fade out).
A while back I saw this on reddit... in case you don't want to click the link, it's a picture of a cigarette with the caption "This plant-based alternative promises to help high schoolers stop vaping".
I would have never thought that people would be stupid enough to try this for real, but here we are...
You're being judgmental but I think you're just misinformed.
Vaping can be difficult to stop because:
- it's more accepted
- it's smoother on the throat, and there's plenty of tastes.
- there is no "dose", if you want to you can just vape non stop, and you can pace yourself. With a cigarette, you can't smoke slowly, or you'll loose half the cigarette.
All in all, it's just more convenient and cheaper to vape. If you're hooked, I can see it quite a challenge to stop. You can always say : "oh I am just taking x drags a day".
Personnally I didn't like vaping much, cause it was the beginning, the tastes were weird, the gear was not great battery-wise. So I kept going back to smoking. Eventually going cold turkey from cigarettes was way easier than through vaping.
Sure and maybe also cover why you wont add pure nicotine to your heroin instead of subjecting yourself and others to documented cancer risk from cigarette smoke.
Well, if smoking cigarettes is easier to quit, then it might be better overall for some people to take up cigarettes a few months and quit, than to keep vaping for the rest of their lives.
Not saying it's the best way to stop, quitting cigarettes has been proven to be very diffult. But GP branding those people as stupid is a bit harsh imo.
while tobacco is indeed more viscerally addictive than vaporized nicotine, i still believe it is wrong to label the act of switching from vapes to cigs as blanket stupidity. a cigarette has a defined start and end point around which the brain may optimize, while vapes have no off switch. from the outside in, it may be difficult to see that this factor may weigh in significantly ... so ill bolster my point by suggesting tobacco is a valid method to control schizophrenia symptoms, i dont believe that high dose nic vapes have the same effect.
People used to smoke everywhere. Bars, restaurants, tiny offices without ventilation, cars, busses, aircraft, underground railway, literally everywhere.
When it became common knowledge that second hand smoke is bad restrictions came into place.
Smoking on public transit (and literally everywhere else too) was totally normal and common up until the 90s when regulations started to trickle in. When I was in elementary school teachers smoked in the teacher's lounge and would talk about when they used to be able to smoke in the classroom. My grandma would take about smoking while at work, and she worked as a seamstress.
Have you read gwern on nicotine? Particularly, in this case, regarding MAOIs in tobacco, so I suppose the hop through gwern isn't entirely necessary, but it's where I first heard of this, anyway.
Yeah, so I have smoked for 80% of the last 30 years… usually between 1/2-1 pack/day. I’ve been cutting back by switching to vape, knowing that it only has nicotine and not the MAOI and other substances. Right before Labour Day weekend I ran out and decided to try going the weekend. It’s been 20 days now and I am starting to feel like the effects of the MAOI are starting to wear off. I still have nicotine cravings, but it’s once I firmly feel like the MAOI withdrawal is gone (probably another week or two) I plan to start breaking the habit with patches and maybe gum.
Step by step, I feel like it might actually stick for real this time. Every time I started up again in the past was contextual (eg a break up, out for drinks with friends, have a half drunk smoke and I’m hooked again). No longer have any smoker friends, no longer have significant drama in my life, hoping it’ll work out.
maois are what make tobacco more than just nicotine (in terms of both benefit potential and addiction potential). maios were the first ever anti depressant, cigarettes are therefore a valid anti depressant too. cigs are also correlated with testosterone. maybe there's an ulterior reason they are demonized?
For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches and they’ve been great, cheap, and legal in the country I live in now.
Recently I got the urge to try vaping again, bought all the paraphernalia and started vaping like a chimney 24/7. Got light nicotine poisoning as well. After two days, I caught myself compulsively reaching for the vape.
So I threw everything away and I’m back to patches. Took me a week to forget the compulsive hand-to-mouth urge. I now believe intradermal nicotine is the superior method of administration. At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
Nicotine is not carcinogenic and neither are nicotine products like patches or gum. Nicotine products are distinct from tobacco products, and tobacco contains a lot more than nicotine, and that cocktail is both carcinogenic and more addictive. That's why nicotine products are used for nicotine cessation, they are strictly less harmful and easier to quit. (That doesn't make nicotine safe but it's in an entirely different league than tobacco. Nicotine products almost certainly won't be the reason you die, whereas tobacco products often are.)
I don’t really know anything about the field other than having heard somewhere over a decade ago of a then-recent study showing that it is in and of itself carcinogenic, but it seems like nicotine and several metabolites have various cancer-promoting properties: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/
But yes, it’s certainly less bad than getting the same amount of nicotine by smoking tobacco.
> At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
In my experience: no, you don't. You just arrange your life around the fact that you need to smoke all the time.
I don't know how they did it but 50 years ago some people did seem to smoke non-stop. Of course they were still an exception.
Of course when they cigarettes were dirt cheap you could let atleast a few burn up with just a puff or two off it also. These days they are so expensive from taxes that setting it down and breathing for a second instead of smoking can feel like burning money.
I'm 55 (UK) and recall the '70s. Loads of people were hardened chain smokers, including my Dad back then and on through to the early noughties. Chain smoking was not an exception at all but it was a dying habit and did trail away. I can remember filling cups with fags for parties to intersperse with the nibbles - you could reach for a handful of crisps or light up or both at the same time. They looked lovely next to the pineapple and cheese hedgehog (you'll have to look that one up!)
He'd go through something like 80 Embassy back then, a day. He gave up in 1984ish and is still trundling along. His Dad died at age 60 of lung cancer.
I gave up about eight years ago after 30 odd years at roughly 20 a day. I definitely did some damage and will eventually have to find out how much. I don't have a near permanent cough and at least five major bouts of 'flu per year anymore. I did have a short bout of Covid in 2021 and I suspect it might have been really nasty if I was still a smoker then.
There was a rumour/some basic statistics that smokers were at more risk in bad cases of Covid but nevertheless were proportionally less likely to have heavy Covid.
But not in America? I mean, we have our little smoker subculture with at least some semblance of etiquette and shibboleths, and the protocols for bumming a cig (ideally, ask to buy one instead, whereupon the other party should just give you one, unless they're nearly out), and so on. We had ashtrays at the ends of the aisles in the grocery store, and restaurant hostesses asking us "smoking or non?" and bringing us ashtrays. People at work grumbling about smokers getting extra breaks all the time, and the smokers for their part having to hike to the smoking area (or enclosure, even). Common memories of the strange experience of being sent to the corner store at a one-digit age to buy a pack for someone. I'm sure that's not all there is to it but I can't think of anything else at the moment. Anyway, what are we missing? I think I sound a little bit defensive about whether America has a significant smoking culture, but I'm just curious.
for what its worth, I was amazed when I moved from the UK to denmark that young people smoked in denmark. For me it was a thing for old people, mostly due to the price I suspect. It just wasn't cool - although vaping has changed both of these since I left, by my understanding
John Wayne is said to have chain-smoked 5-7 packs a day? If you can smoke a cigarette every ~30 mins, that's 2/hour (actually about 1.5 packs/day), but if a cigarette takes 10 minutes to smoke and you chain-smoke, that's 6/hour (4.5 packs/day). So it's doable but John Wayne was significantly out of breath the last 10+ years of his life, perhaps from having an entire lung removed.
Lucille Ball's voice changed dramatically over the course of the 6yr show from heavy smoking. Their show was sponsored by cigarette companies and she used to hand out cigarettes on a platter to guest when they came over to her house.
I went to a Black Keys concert in 2007 or so that was sponsored by Camel cigarettes and they were giving out free packs of their newest variety at the door.
A lifelong chain smoker will smoke a cigarette in 1-2 minutes and light up another. 3-5 minutes is a relaxed casual smoke. Cigarettes were modified a decade or so ago to ensure that they go out quickly if not actively smoked. It's not even possible anymore to keep a cigarette burning for long enough for it to take 10 minutes.
This is all pedantic. The point is that you can chain smoke quite a lot if you're dedicated. I've never met anyone who smoked more than two packs a day regularly or maybe three on a crazy night out of drinking and smoking. 4-5 is crazy.
My step-father’s parents smoked a carton a day. Each. They started smoking before breakfast and stopped just before sleep. Their trailer home had a 2-3’ cloud of haze below the ceiling and every surface was sticky. I’m not how many years they smoked like that, but probably decades.
As a kid, I could not breathe in there. This would have been late 70s. No way they could have afforded that habit at today’s prices.
Mid to late 70s? Their last years were nothing but medical issues (from the smoking, plus excessive drinking) and poor health. Certainly kept me from starting to smoke.
It would be fascinating if someone could live a long life despite smoking so much
Genetic variation probably has a bigger role than we'd like to admit. There are definitely outliers. I know smokers who lived into their 90s, and non-smokers who died much younger. The sibling comment says they lived into their 70s, which is probably average.
> I know smokers who lived into their 90s, and non-smokers who died much younger
I hate this anecdata. I do know these too.
But statistics don't lie. The odd outlier is not relevant. How many times can you roll the dice and win the saving throw? Smoking kills, and when it doesn't it destroys well-being.
Even without the health issues smokers becoming absolute pricks because they didn't get their fix. Or how much imposing their cloud of ash is invasive, even in open air. Did you know that parents going outside to smoke in front of the door thinking of their child is mostly a feel-good thing? The minimal distance to not impact the child is 10m, and that's not counting the nicotine and ash that permeates the skin and clothing, which gets ingested in the next hug or three, leading to significant amounts of nicotine being found in children hair.
I know, I've been there, I've been that guy. Stressing out because I had only two left in the pack on a Sunday. Rushing to buy a pack before the shop closes like my life depended on it. Snapping out when the effects wears off. Leaving the table at restaurants to get my fix. Barely able to get through an entire movie at the cinema, and as soon as credits roll, get out and immediately swallow an entire cigarette in under a minute.
Now that I'm out of it I can see the absolutely disrespectful behaviour, and in a way I understand because I've been there, I've been the addict that can't see how I harm not just me but others too. I've been the addict that keeps the blindfold of denial so that I can continue satisfying my craving.
And now life is _so much_ better without it. Much better energy, focus, willpower, and freedom.
There is _nothing_ positive about smoking. It's death in a tube, plain and simple.
2-pack-a-day smoker here (~40 cigs per day), for over 10 years (twice that if you consider the time I was 1 pack or less a day).
I stopped smoking and started vaping for a while (~1.5 years) and went back to smoking after some bad vape experiences. At some point, even the smell of the liquid would cause me nausea.
My health is surprisingly good despite the habit. I walk every day, and I can do longer cardio without loosing breath or feeling tired. I'm either lucky or sitting on some ticking time bomb that went unnoticed so far.
I definitely recommend not starting on either though.
My sister-in-law was so upset when we ran a 10K together, I beat her by 5 or 6 minutes, and when she found me at the finish line I was having a smoke.
Genetic lottery for sure. I’m still quitting but it’s not really because of acute or chronic health problems, mostly cost and being tired of stinking all the time.
> There is no human on earth that can smoke continuously the entire day for very long
Out of curiosity how old are you? I remember plenty of places in my younger days where it was commonplace for people to light up their next cig off of their current one pretty much nonstop
I'm sure some people acclimate to it but if you give it a try I think you'll find first your throat will get burned, then you'll start to cough more and more, and eventually you'll throw up. And I think GP was suggesting that, beyond acclimating, there's also other demands on your time and you usually can't smoke through them all.
>For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches
My first thought was "That's a no brainer why didn't I think of that".
Then I remembered that I grew up during peak anti-smoking and so they made nicotine out to be some sort of borderline meth boogeyman rather than just extra addictive extra effective caffeine that comes in bad for your health form factors and that all that propaganda got sent straight to long term memory and I was indoctrinated by it at such a young age it didn't even occur to me to think outside the box like that.
Nicotine patches are expensive for what they are but they're basically free compared to meds.
It's two very touchy subjects: nicotine and ADHD. I'm not fond to talk about it because misinformation and ignorance is just rampant. Nicotine has indeed been turned into the boogeyman.
Anyway, I told my psych about my plan, and he agreed there is research indicating nicotine works as a third-line stimulant medication for ADHD. In many modern, Western countries adult ADHD is not even recognized, let alone medicated, so one has to make do with what's available.
In my experience it is almost as effective as amphetamines, with fewer side effects, much longer lasting (a patch lasts 16+ hours), and very cheap - if you get them on ebay from China. Addiction potential is null: addiction is a function of how quickly the effect peaks, and it takes 3 hours. Not even lisdexamfetamine can compare with how unaddictive patches are.
That said, if I had access to prescription amphetamines, I'd go back to them, but I sure don't miss the days all it did was making me incredibly horny and focused scrolling social media all day long. It was a little too effective at keeping me engaged for my own good, so using a subpar medication means learning to live with ADHD, adjusting your life around your own quirk, rather than only relying on the medication to fix everything for you.
I did, I mostly agree. They certainly don’t paint nicotine as the loathsome, terrifying substance everyone believes it to be. It’s a mildly addictive stimulant just a bit more toxic than caffeine.
On one hand, yes, nicotine in many ways does deserve the reputation it's received. Then again, a lot of the blame should go more towards smoking rather than nicotine the substance.
Nicotine is highly addictive, but as you mentioned, the delivery method plays a huge role in its addictive potential, and most people don't realize this. The chances that you'll become addicted to patches is incredibly low. If they were that addictive, then they'd likely be way more effective in helping people quit smoking; in reality, it's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of patch users who successfully end up quitting smoking that way. Even with the highest dose patches, the addiction potential is still relatively low because the patches release the nicotine over a very long period of time and make it difficult or impossible to associate the use of the substance with a ritualistic activity like lighting and puffing on a cigarette.
And yeah, it's not a subject you can really bring up with anyone besides recreational drug users. Very few will be receptive to the idea that nicotine has legitimate uses and can be used without getting addicted.
Only about 6% nicotine users manage to quit every year.
Your linked article:
Yet, only about 6 percent of smokers are able to quit in a given year.
Other than when it talks about prescription smoking cessation tools, the article does not mention anything other than tobacco smokers. The last paragraph of the article actually discusses the observation that the ritual of smoking often provides substantial behavioral reinforcement to the smoker who is attempting to quit smoking.
I also note that I was able to quit nicotine cold-turkey after smoking cigarettes for two years. I've never been able to quit caffeine... and -although it is notably shorter in duration- caffeine withdrawal is WAY worse than nicotine withdrawal.
Given how sloppy you were with the article you implicitly claimed to have read, I have zero confidence in the accuracy of your anecdotes.
> Thank you for checking the source.
Respectfully, why the hell didn't you check it? It's only a couple of pages long. Did you do something dreadfully silly like employ some LLM to "assist" you with your conversation?
It might be addicting, but it's still overcomable, since 2002 there's more former smokers in the US than active smokers. 66% of all Americans who have ever smoked have successfully quit.
The research seems to indicate it's a cancer accelerant -- it doesn't cause cancer directly, but it promotes the growth and spread of existing tumors.
Studies suggest it does this through several pathways including:
(a) preventing cancer cells from self-destructing
(b) making tumor cells divide more quickly
(c) stimulating the growth of new blood vessels in and around tumors, helping them grow; and
(d) helping cancer cells metastasize more easily by increasing mobility via epithelial-mesenchymal transition.
It also lowers the effectiveness of chemo and radiotherapy.
Admittedly, most of these are animal/lab studies, in part because it's hard to design a good study in humans since so many patients also use/used cigarettes and vapes, which confounds the results. Still, there's enough evidence out there to be cautious.
I still wear them now, but I've quit them before. It took about a year. Same steps as the 6 week steps, just drawn out further.
They tell you not to cut them, because that cuts into their profits. It's a sticker. The amount of nicotine you get is directly proportional to the surface area. A step 3 patch is exactly 1/3 the size of a step 1. This makes it extremely easy to control the exact amount to tapper off.
The hard part most people don't get is the addiction is only about 50% physical to the nicotine. Your brain craves the habit regardless of the chemical. Habits suck. People seek help to stop chewing their fingernails. I still go for walks with the regularity of smoking. I can feel it. It builds up. I need to go for a walk. Same as going for a cigarette before.
I smoked for roughly 30 years and was not in very good shape when I gave up eight years ago - that improved rather a lot.
The problem is that nicotine is not the only addictive substance involved. If it was then you could chew gum, wear patches or whatever and off you go. There is an extremely complicated set of chemicals involved in fag smoke. There is also the habit effect and other complications.
In the end I think that boring old will power is the only way and any trick or tool or whatever that you can deploy to bolster that is how you give up.
My initial plan was to vape but I soon found that unsatisfying and it looked to me like trying to substitute one habit with another.
Once I started stopping, I didn't want to stop! It was extremely hard but I always reminded myself that I had got so far and that that time would be wasted if I had to start again. I followed doubled up time periods - one day, two days, 1/2 a week, a week, a fortnight, a month, two months ("cripes, this might work") and so on.
A mental tool I developed was a couple of mantras: "I don't want to smell" and "I don't want to die". Whenever I felt the cravings I repeated those to myself and I have no idea why but it did work for a while at a time. Gradually the need tailed off (say around two years)
I remember having quite vivid dreams where I would "crack" and start smoking again. I had to do quite a lot of mental verification to prove to myself that it was just a dream. At one point I even smelt my clothes to prove to myself it was all a dream.
We are all different and there is no right or wrong way to quit. One thing we can all agree on is it is hard, very hard but not impossible. Pick a strategy that might work for you and be prepared to change it but please do have a go. It really is worth it.
Hey, another person with addiction-intolerant ADHD! I have run into so few people who encountered and noted it. Most people can’t just treat a compulsion by curtailing it through willpower, though I still don’t comprehend why. Ironic that the willpower disorder wins the day versus the baseline.
I always wondered if ADHD and smoking were related.
I’m ADHD boy for sure, and my dad and his younger sister are both very much not like my aunt, who is more like me. Shes in her 80s now, and was the only smoker - literally smoked cartons a week for about as long as I remember.
I deleted my comment talking about it because it usually goes badly with the HN audience and their preconceived notions.
But I have had the hypothesis (as a layman) that growing around smokers affects the brain of a child, they self-medicate with tobacco, and the cycle continues, and it has for many generations until today when smoking is frowned upon and self-medication is no longer readily available. I don’t think smoking is the cause of all of ADHD, but we’ll eventually learn that dopamine dysfunction has a lot of different causes.
I've had similar thoughts! I grew up around a heavy smoker. My dad told me to never smoke and I never have. But I randomly tried a nicotine lozenge in my 40s and found it such a "lightbulb on" moment that I've been using pouches for a few years now and my executive functioning still feels better for it (though not as much now as in the first two years, alas).
I, too, have experimented with the patches over the last year. Nicotine is great in a lot of ways, but whether it's a tool or a crutch depends on both the person and the delivery method.
The patches are different, not just because it lacks that same connection to compulsive and ritualistic activity, but it simply doesn't provide the same quick "hit" that makes smoking far more addictive.
On the other hand, someone prone to addictive tendencies probably shouldn't even use the patches. Even the patches can be a gateway to vaping and smoking for such a person. I have simply never been the type to become addicted to any drug or substance, other than the occasional overeating. This isn't to say that I don't have the potential to get hooked on more powerful drugs, but my innate desire to use them is a lot less than I think is average. Even during times where I've habitually drunk copious amounts of alcohol, I've always been able to realize "this kinda sucks so I think I'm gonna stop" and then I just do without really much struggle other than some brain fog for a few days. Similarly, I sometimes use phenibut, and people talk about how easy it is to become dependent on it and how hard it is to get off it, and that hasn't been my experience in the slightest. Someone without a clear objective around how they use substances like that will be much more likely to end up suffering.
That said, the patches are great for focus and anxiety when used in low doses in moderation. I don't necessarily advise that everyone use them as I have, but I also don't think they're anywhere near as harmful as one might assume. I don't feel the need to ever switch to smoking or vapes, or even gums and pouches.
That said, the patches are great for focus and anxiety when used in low doses in moderation
There is almost no good evidence of this. Effect sizes are tiny, if any. Just placebo and anecdotal. The effect is so small it's not even worth it from
This has not been my experience. Obviously there's no way I can disprove a placebo effect, but I don't find myself to be particularly prone to placebo effects or magical thinking. The vast majority of the time,, I don't notice much effect if at all from the "amazing" psychoactives, nootropics, pharmaceuticals, supplements, etc., short of full blown psychedelics and stimulants. Perhaps I'm prone to the nocebo effect. Then again, if I nearly always have the nocebo effect, it would seem odd to me that suddenly I would have the placebo effect with patches. Is it like adderall? No, but I would be stunned if researchers performed a double-blind study of patches on me as the sole subject and couldn't find a measurable difference in my behavior in terms of task persistence.
The only way I could quit my nicotine addiction was to slowly reduce the amount of nicotine in my vape juice. Even at 0% nicotine and no more physical dependence it still took a whole year to finally stop vaping. If I had a single cigarette I would have to start the whole process over again. Nicotine addiction is a terrible enslavement.
Which is why it is BS that many places have marketted and regulated away fillable vapes and buying your own juice. Most vapes available now are disposables and have one and only one concentration level available.
Wait, where are disposable vapes allowed, but not refillable vapes/traditional e-cigs? Plenty of places are banning disposable vapes on an e-waste basis, but never heard of the opposite.
The interesting part I think is that physical nicotine addiction only lasts two weeks. It's the smoking ritual that is so potent. I have several ex-smokers in my family who even after decades still have situations where they associate certain cues with smoking.
Honestly, the mental aspect of addiction is what makes it difficult. Anyone can get through a couple of weeks feeling like shit, especially if you have support. But for years and years, you can be addicted to something that never even entered your body.
i know this sounds dumb on the surface, but assuming you have other restrictions in your life it works.
Vaping tastes great, can be done indoors, doesn’t need an ash tray, and others around you are mildly annoyed vs visibly upset. Cigarettes are the direct opposite of all of those. The added friction could put someone over the hump.
I am more of a cigar smoker, I used to smoke a cigar every month, every other month and sometimes all month long for several months, but I was never addicted, I have gone a year or two without cigars, currently I have not had one in about five years now, give or take. I could have one any moment, they sit in my humidor, but I did try ecigs for a little bit. I'd love to have an alternative that doesn't compromise my health, but until then I'll keep my cigars.
I love cigars for various reasons, but there's no true alternative that's worth while.
To be clear, it's 100%, definitely not good for you - but the level of harm doesn't seem to be even close to cigarettes or chewing tobacco.
The amount consumed is much less, the smoke shouldn't be entering your lungs, and if there are tons of good, "all-natural" tobacco out there without all the additives put in by cigarette companies.
There have been calls in the Netherlands (perhaps even at the EU level) to ban filtered cigarettes, for the simple reason that they are misleading and offer no protection, but are harmful to the environment because of the non-degradable micro-plastics.
I have had a pipe or another over the years, but its kind of the same thing to me, though it feels like more effort than a cigar and just more maintenance... Cigars are easy, "quick" to get going, and if you sit it in your cigar friendly ash tray they turn themselves off for whenever you want to pick them back up.
BS, fake news, and dumb. Did a handful of humans actually post about this? I'm sure, and probably tried it for a day. But "people," as in a group of people large enough to be remotely news worthy? No. This is just bait. Also not hacker news.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely uncommon in Norway (and probably also Sweden) to quit cigarettes by switching to snus (tobacco between your lip/gum).
Try pipe tobacco in a corncob (beginner level, easy/forgiving) or briar (more advanced, takes packing & coal management technique) pipe. Way less costly than cigarettes, in more ways than the wallet!
In early 2025, a Dutch newspaper was also writing about young adults struggling with vaping addiction, and how some switch to smoking as a better alternative.
I quit smoking by using Swedish snus until I got used to not smoking and then just tapered off the snus. This was after smoking 2 packs a day for 10+ years.
A significant factor in vapes not overtaking cigarettes is the tobacco lobby; they pay to play in legislature to ban vapes and associated paraphernalia in many US states, as well as create their own vape products to play both sides of the market. It's difficult to use vapes to quit smoking cigarettes when vape juice and single use vapes get banned, yet cigarettes remain legal.
I hate to be a shill for pharma but one of my friends went on Chantix and the results seem incredible to me.
I believe the clinical studies put it at 50% success rate or higher depending on how many weeks you continue the regiment.
For those of you looking to quit tobacco, I think looking toward medical solutions is the way to go. It’s too bad our medical system has incentivized shyness around finding medical solutions.
I will second this, having enjoyed similar success. The idea is that you start taking it, smoke normally the first day or two, then stop (if I understand the mechanism correctly the drug uses the nicotine to guide it to the correct receptors at the outset and subsequently the molecules self-attach to each other). You take it 4 or 6 weeks - I think 4, but it was 16 years ago so I forget. Contrary to what some imagine, there's no long-term dose. Within the first few days your cravings evaporate, by the end of the course smelling someone else's cigarette evokes a mild feeling of nausea. It's the only approach that never resulted in a relapse of some kind for me.
There are side effects; it can cause stomach bleeding if you don't carefully take it with meals, so if your breakfast is just a cup of coffee you'll need to adjust to consuming food; and it's associated with intensely vivid dreams which can disrupt your sleep. I experienced both but did not find it that bad, I blame myself for playing a bit fast and loose with the mealtime warnings. idk what it costs now but I paid $400 for the full course out of pocket, probably like $750 today with inflation. So, less than 6 months of moderate cigarette use.
It doesn't fix the psychological desire for a 'smoke break'; for about 6 months I chewed gum (ordinary gum, not nicotine) to get past the mental habit of wanting to consume something. Some people reported using a fidget toy to give their hands something to do. My theory is that if you have a severe smoking addition it is probably because nicotine slotted neatly into some pre-existing somatic need, so once you get past the cravings stage it's worth exploring why smoking or vaping became such a big deal for you in the first place.
It gave my grandmother strokes. She never smoked again, and was still around, but never quite the same. She told me once, "I miss smoking every day. I loved it so much."
I had a family member who became suicidal on Chantix. I was wanting to quit at the same time so when given the option I went with Zyban (bupropion hydrochloride) and had quit by the second week.
What was really incredible though was right from the start I felt fantastic, like I spent all day in a flow state.
The doctor stopped the prescription after (I think) 8 weeks and I didn't start smoking again. Many years later I learned it is prescribed for ADHD and also as an antidepressant.
Here's what I did to get rid of my nicotine addiction (vaping):
- Gradually lower the strength of my liquid until it was at the minimum.
- Stop all vaping and switch to nicotine gum
- Gradually increase the time between each gum
- Stop the gum altogether
This process took probably 3 months and tbh it was pretty miserable the whole time. It's 100% worth it tho, You don't realize how much it controls your life until you stop. You will also still get random cravings for a year or two afterwards, Heck it's been 4 years and I still sometimes get dreams where I'm vaping.
My father did the same thing. He used to smoke a pack a day and the day that I was born he quit and never touched it again, and then when I was old enough to understand cigarettes, he taught me to never start smoking and I never have.
Not necessarily. I’m over 40 now and had a total of 3 cigarettes in my life, all of them in my twenties, parties, hanging out with people smoking etc.
Every time it was a terrible experience and I was amazed why people do this to themselves…
I don't think OP advice is wrong as a general advice though. I've also smoked very sporadically and never got really hooked (as opposed to my whole family), but plenty of regular smokers started with that first one. It's better to not take any chances.
No need to be drama queen. I am also 40+, had for sure 10-20 cigarettes in my teenage years to try it and on social ocassions with friends, never saw the appeal and don't remember my 1st cigarette. For the record I dislike as well taste of beer or coffee, got used to wine.
Now recreational marijuana (ideally through bong) is way way more appealing than dumb tobacco cigarettes which do nothing, had it during my teenage years and also during my 20s on different ocassions with colleagues/friends and I can see myself having some even now in 40s if I could buy it legally.
Though it took my dad a bit longer, he managed to quit for good when I was a kid. Still died of lung disease at 80, but I have to think it would likely have been much sooner if he'd never quit. Anyway, watching him struggle with it when I was young definitely make me repulsed by cigarettes (and most other addictive substances) such that I've certainly never been tempted to try them.
I don't know the movie or show but there is a scene where someone asks a woman who quick smoking a long time ago (10 years maybe?) if she ever thinks about smoking and she says "every time someone lights up next to me at the bar I want to suck the smoke out of their lungs."
I smoked more than a pack a day for probably 7 or 8 years and quit a couple years after college, not quite cold turkey but basically just trying to wait a little longer between each cigarette. Eventually when the last half of the pack is stale and disgusting but you smoke them anyway because they're expensive, you just kind of stop one day. It was many, many years of no nicotine at all before I stopped thinking about it every day though.
Went cold turkey during the first covid lockdown. It was a combination of not being able to go out to buy cigarettes and also the fear of dying since I was a heavy chainsmoker.
I finally quit because of COVID. I got long COVID so bad and my lungs were so messed up that every time I tried to smoke it was a horrible experience. 6 months later when I finally felt good enough to try again the desire was pretty much gone. I genuinely tried to re addict myself and couldn’t do it
For me, it was the requirement to be nicotine free for a few months around a surgery.
I went the patch route and it was a somewhat difficult 3 months, but it has been a blessing not have to clear-out my through every morning or anxiously anticipating stuff like a long flight or train ride.
I also got the "oh shit, I relapsed" dreams for about a year after I quit.
> Heck it's been 4 years and I still sometimes get dreams where I'm vaping.
It has been way more than four years for me, and I'll smell some cigarette smoke when I'm in a mood and be all like "Man, wouldn't it be nice if I got me one of those?".
But, I can say the same sort of thing about my reaction to the odor of coffee or caffeinated tea. Despite the fact that the very same place I get my coffee and tea from sells cigarettes -and wouldn't even card me because I'm so very obviously old- I've been able to quit nicotine. I've never been able to quit caffeine.
I am very prone to (mostly digital) addictions, but on nicotine, despite having been smoking 7 years, I’ve quit cold turkey without trouble, and since then, I can absolutely just borrow one to a friend, maybe 2 or 3 times per year, without any withdrawal symptoms. It does not have any effect. I don’t understand anything about that :|
That's funny, as I was reading the comments on this page I was thinking the opposite: I don't understand people who get addicted to things.
Smoking seems gross and stupid and self-destructive to me.
Alcohol does nothing for me, I don't understand why people drink alcohol when it's clear they will get a hangover. Sometimes I drink wine or beer but there's nothing appealing about it.
Gambling (casinos, online, sports betting) seems stupid and pointless - it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll lose, it's the whole point of a casino.
Because it is not pleasurable at all? When I was a kid, I saw a couple of friends get addicted to smoking, from the first cigarette. I have seen dozens of acquaintances as well because I was interested in the process.
Even myself tested his firsts cigarettes.
It was so painful. The body reacts violently when you try to poison it. Severe coughs that people try to hide, trying to appear strong while they could not help it making impulsive movements. It tastes like sh*ht, it burns your lungs. You stink, your clothing and breath stinks.
It takes a lot of concious and painful work in order to force your body into accepting that.
For me it was pure stupidity to make a deliberate effort to get hooked into an addiction, so I just did not continue.
I couldn't help but see that this way. I read a lot so I knew what was coming next. It is like casinos not inviting mathematicians or physicist to conferences, as because of their training, they can see the probabilities inside out and never fall in the emotional trap.
Of course it's smoke you are inhaling. But guess what? Eventually, you get used to it, you learn to ignore the smell and the pain. Because it's just that good. Which is why it's addicting.
> For me it was pure stupidity to make a deliberate effort to get hooked into an addiction.
No one starts smoking (or any addiction) thinking about that. It's always "just to try", they can stop anytime they want, they are strong-willed enough to resist.
I have never been addicted to nicotine so can't compare but it's quite easy to quit caffeine, I'll get headaches for a few days and then it's gone. But then what? Caffeine makes it easy to concentrate and work, enables me to get anything done at all. Other drugs that do that are illegal. Maybe one day, when I'm no longer working, I'll quit it for good. Not yet.
In my late 20s and early 30s I would frequently join my coworkers outside while they took a smoke break. I would generally try to stay at the periphery or upwind when possible. Over time, I found myself having inexplicable cravings for a cigarette despite never having smoked one. Presumably this was due second hand exposure. (Acknowledging it would have been smarter to simply stay indoors.)
That eventually faded after our careers took us in different directions, and landing remote roles or at places with fewer or no smokers.
I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to quit. Props to anyone who makes the attempt, successfully or otherwise.
I vaped for around a year and each attempt to quit ended in failure.
The first attempt, quite early on, I hadn't realised how dependent I'd become and thought it would be easy. Sure, I enjoyed vaping, but I didn't "have" to do it. Give it a couple days and I'll be back to normal. Predictably that went poorly.
Various other attempts I'd now look back on as thinking I could outsmart addiction and try to ease out of it, when in reality it was little more than procrastination.
Oh, I'll start to limit the times I vape. Only between certain hours. Or I'll go outside and do it, make it inconvenient and less appealing. I'll buy flavours I don't enjoy as much and change the association.
For me the only way to stop was to accept the unpleasantness of going cold-turkey. I knew going in that the first 48-72 hours would be brutal but that it would get significantly easier afterwards. There's always a reason to delay but everything I attempted short of actually stopping feels like self-deception.
- stop smoking in certain situations (no cigarette at the bus stop, no cigarette after lunch, …)
- allow myself to put out a cigarette halfway when I’m smoking. I lapsed and lit one, but that doesn’t mean I have to finish it.
- try to feel the downsides of the cigarette while smoking. The nicotine high mostly overrides this, but it’s possible to concentrate on the yucky feeling in your mouth, your lungs being burned etc.
- telling myself that I am sure I want to stop smoking at some point in my life so I might as well stop now.
Good job!! Would it have been less miserable if you did it more slowly? With antidepressants and other psychoactive meds the ride tends to be easier when it's drawn out longer.
Last time I managed to get addicted, the gum was a lifeline. I found it pretty easy to switch to, to be honest, and just told myself it was OK if I was on it forever. After about 4 months of as much gum as I wanted, whenever, I started working down through the dosages, eventually making little Franken-gums by using a pill-cutter and regular gum to split the dosage further.
I did something similar but without the gum stage. Since I was buying concentrated nicotine liquid and diluting it with a PG/VG mix, I would just reduce the strength until I was literally putting a single drop of the strong nicotine liquid into my 10ml vial of PG/VG. Then to prevent just vaping more I would count the number of puffs per hour and reduce it until after one puff per hour I'd go to one puff every 2 hours etc.
I drew it out over several months. The thing I was really surprised by was that when I finally stopped, I still felt withdrawal symptoms, which is a testament to how addictive nicotine is, given what a tiny amount I had reached.
I actually tried something similar, but failed. I'm curious, how often did you dilute and by how much?
This was my setup: I mixed up 100ml of e-juice in a graduated bottle at whatever strength I was using at the time, somewhere between 15 and 20 mg/ml, can't remember exactly. From that bottle, I would fill a separate 10ml bottle, which I'd use to refill my tank. After refilling the 10ml bottle, I would top up the big bottle with VG/PG back up to 100ml, so diluting by 10%. I was vaping about half a 5ml tank per day at this point, so the 10ml one lasted about 4 days, and I'd top up the tank every morning. The theory being that the stuff in the tank would also get somewhat diluted every time I topped it up, since it would gradually get more of the stuff from the most recent filling of the 10ml bottle.
But somehow I just ended up unconsciously vaping more and with longer puff until I was at one tank per day, and then more than one tank per day.
Instead of a tank I was also using an open dripper head on the vape, so I could basically limit how many drops of liquid I was putting on the actual coil. And I would basically just look at the clock to see when it was time to add more.
I never got in to smoking, but even having done ZYNs a handful of times (e.g., with friends on trips, think I bought 2-3 tins maximum), I find myself craving them. Nicotine is insane.
It's an idea I've considered. Quitting cigarettes was much easier than quitting vaping has been. You can vape in your home, most places and at most times. You don't have any concept really of how much you're using. With cigarettes you have to take time, go outside, and you can literally count them making it easier to track your reduction.
Cigarettes are ridiculously more addictive. I know this from experience, but also from a study that found that MAOIs (in cigarettes, but not found in vapes) "dramatically increase the motivation to self-administer nicotine in rats."[1]
I had a wickedly difficult time quitting cigarettes, many failed attempts over the course of years. Vaping made quitting tobacco comically easy, and quitting vaping was also comically easy compared to cold turkey. To quit my all-day vaping habit I just...got rid of the vapes and stopped doing it. I thought about it a few times a day for the first few days, and that was it.
People saying to avoid vapes as a cessation tool are committing actual harm, imo. It's like the difference in difficulty between just jumping off a roof versus using a ladder to descend. Yes, ladders are risky, but not as risky as jumping off a roof.
I have to confirm the article. After switching from cigarettes to vaping and vaping for several years, I decided to go back to cigarettes precisely to get rid of the monstrous vaping addiction.
While never a heavy smoker I absolutely loved vaping: it was the first thing my hand reached for in the morning and the last it let go falling asleep. I went into panics when I couldn't remember where I had left my vape.
I've now managed to further reduce my smoking to only very few cigarettes per day. This might well still be more harmful than vaping all day long, but at least I got rid of my sixth finger (as a friend used to call it) and I can forget about smoking or vaping for many hours a day.
I'm not sure the damage from vaping is even close to that of smoking, especially if you smoke a lot. Nevertheless, at some point I decided I was way too attached to it- though I only had a small vape with low nicotine and rather neutral taste as opposed to those things that produce entire cumulonimbi of cherry-flavoured vapour. At least with cigarettes I am acutely aware of the harm, constantly try to keep it in check, and to smoke I need at least to reach an open place.
Part of the problem is that vapes easily let you ingest a lot more nicotine than cigarettes. Researchers in the Netherlands found that some teens are vaping so much they effectively have the nicotine intake of a three pack a day tobacco addiction. This is due to a combination of (illegal) vapes being available in all sorts of fruity and hip child-friendly flavours, illegal vapes simply containing more nicotine, and vapes coming in reservoirs good for 9000 or so 'puffs'.
If you stuck with plain vapes bought through a legal channel, that risk factor would have been absent.
Is nicotine a problem, though? I'm not a cigarette or vaping guy. I do like a nicotine pouch, and I love an evening pipe. My understanding is that nicotine is not much of a problem, but the smoke / vape contaminants are where the real hazard lies.
For many demographics nicotine by itself poses a clear health risk. Basically that's pregnant women and anyone under 25 whose brains are still developing, according to the CDC. The WHO further states that nicotine use also increases cardiovascular risk, and that's for everyone. This last one was new to me too until a while ago (although fortunately I never take nicotine in any form).
That is what is left if you ignore the big one, which is its addictiveness. By itself that is probably not directly harmful, but the ways of consuming nicotine mostly are. Nicotine pouches carry some health risks, but are obviously not nearly as bad as snus and other crap like that containing tobacco.
I feel like the addictiveness isn't the big one? Playing with fidget spinners can be addictive, but there's no push to put warning labels on them.
As for the nicotine: yes, it's not great for your cardiovascular system. One Juul pod per day probably twice as bad as drinking three Starbucks grande drip coffees. However, the harm reduction of vaping is profound. Smoked tobacco is just devastatingly worse: smoke has carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, acrolein, and these are on top of the radioactive polonium and lead isotopes.
It's crazy seeing a lot of fearmongering (not saying that's what you're doing, but it is certainly a prevailing narrative) about vaping when, per the data, it's the strongest smoking cessation tool available outside prescription drugs.
switched to vaping in 2011, and finally quit that last month. I started on 1.5 “step 1” patches and have tapered down to .5 over the last 6 weeks. Hardest thing I’ve ever done.
good. smoking is better for the soul than vaping. and you look cooler too.
i consume roughly 50mg of nicotine a day through pouches and have no issues quitting cold turkey, often for weeks at a time. its nice to reset your tolerance. but i find it hard to believe others find it so addicting. same with caffeine. do people really get headaches because they miss a coffee?
alcohol is another story tho. it's a lot more enjoyable and thus harder to eliminate without actually replacing it with something else.
The pouches are how I got off vaping as well. The vaping is how I quit smoking, but I would never go back to either.
I actually prefer and enjoy the slower nicotine delivery of pouches. If the oral fixation is a problem for anyone, they can just leave the pouch in long after it's dead. They're easy to stop using because there's no chasing a "rush". I think it's a superior product design.
I also go long periods of time without pouches, but I will say 50mg a day is quite a lot. I average about four of the 6mg pouches in a day when I even use them at all.
I tapered off alcohol when the anxiety during hangovers and compulsive overeating started to get out of hand. It was a good run. I'll have the occasional seltzer during holidays or events. That genuinely is just one or two to get a slight buzz. I can't feel any euphoria from it anymore, just mild relaxation that eventually progresses back into stress when I go over my limit. A big help in confirming it wasn't "all in my head" was my smartwatch showing my elevated heart rate, low HRV, and bad sleep.
In the end, moderation is key as it's ever been. It's a lot easier when the top (or sometimes only) options are not just beer and cigarettes.
"Nicotine is just caffeine" is too clean given the tumor-promotion evidence. To a large extent, it comes down to the method of delivery: patches are difficult to get hooked on because they do not cause a rapid spike in nicotine levels and are not associated with any ritual; cigarettes are hard to give up due to that spike, the accompanying ritual, and the MAO inhibitors found in the smoke; while vapes occupy a middle ground—which is precisely why they help some people quit smoking but foster addiction in others.
yeah it's annoying when people overstate the efficacy of patches. if patches worked as well as cigs, everyone would just buy patches instead (huge market here..don't steal my idea).
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 45.9 ms ] threadYes this is and has always been an option. Find any real vape shop at any point in the past... _checks calendar_ 15 years at least, and they will sell you nearly any of their "e-juice" products with no nicotine.
Trick is, the companies making disposables vapes/pods/etc generally don't offer them because those are generally large tobacco and other companies and ... well, why would they manufacturer and sell a non-addictive cigarette when an addictive version exists.
0% nicotine was an option almost 20 years ago when I started vaping and is still available. The tobacco companies getting involved and polluting the streets with single use lithium ion batteries and shit have done nothing but made everything worse.
Also, vaping is fucking obnoxious for non smokers, clouds of awful smelling residue, and plastic shit everywhere. I'd rather people smoked, ideally those e-cigs that burn tobacco but cut out most of the toxins.
As a former smoker and non-smoker for a long time now, I disagree.
> ...clouds of awful smelling residue...
IME, most of the time it smells far better than cigarette smoke.
> ...and plastic shit everywhere.
Litterbugs are gonna litter, man. I know this because I live in a place with a very high concentration of them. Is the litterbug done with his drink, takeout, or other item that came in some disposable packaging? Is the trash can that's clearly visible from his current location more than two feet away? Then that packaging ends up directly on the sidewalk or tossed into the street.
Worse than that are litterbugs who are also dog owners. Their creed is "Pick up my dog's dogshit and put it in a trashcan? Hell no, fuck that, and fuck you!".
Unless you have an incredibly defective vaporizer, that "smoke" you're talking about is as much smoke as the "steam" in a hot shower is. If your vaporizer is producing smoke, you need to dispose of it and get one that doesn't set things on fire.
> Our lungs are extremely sensitive receptors and are pretty much supposed to interact with absolutely nothing else other than the air we breathe.
You might be astounded at how much junk is in the air we breathe, even in "clean" natural locations. Because the natural environment is so incredibly filthy and because the natural environment contains so many things that want to eat us (because -as it turns out- we're made of food!) our bodies are built to interact with and neutralize all sorts of contaminants.
Breathing air with more than ~12ug/m^3 of small particles is considered less than ideally healthy. (This is where PM2.5 comes from.)
Go check out the mass of fine particles per puff:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507187/#_sec_000047_
This is so many orders of magnitude above the “good” AQI threshold that it’s almost comical.
Now, sure, different particles have different health characteristics, but the stuff coming out of a vape isn’t water, and you’d better hope that it is many orders of magnitude less damaging than the fine particles that are found in the environment if you actually want to believe that your lungs are prepared to handle it.
(Okay, it’s obviously orders of magnitude less damaging than, say, wildfire smoke or brake dust or restaurant kitchen exhaust on a per-microgram basis, but the question is how many orders of magnitude less dangerous.)
P.S. I strongly suspect that there is one common dry aerosol that is genuinely harmless in moderate amounts: sodium chloride from sea spray. It’s highly soluble and found all over inside your body. I’m not sure to what extent air quality impact studies try to separate out the AQI impact from sea spray from everything else.
[0]: https://tryfum.com
Worked well for me, might not work so well for others.
Personally I thought that was the whole deal with vapes, use them as a tool to beat the addiction to 'real' tobacco products, but it looks like the world proved me wrong on that one.
The next will be nicotine free tobacco. .. the leafs will be watered for a undisclosed amount of time to remove the nicotine as it's water soluble. It's like decaffeinated coffee - it's when you need this tastes but your heart can't take it anymore :)
If we won’t tax the bots for UBI, at least we can still have smoker-subsidized school lunches.
I once successfully quit smoking by buying a pack of cigarettes made with tobacco that had been cleansed of its nicotine. I bought them one evening on the way home from work.
That first night was rough because nicotine withdraw be like that. The second day was still not great, but it was easier. By the third day, I'd had enough. On about the fourth day, I threw the rest away because they were just tiresome.
They were lousy. They tasted terrible compared to my usual brand. And smoking them did nothing to quench my addiction-driven craving for nicotine -- the reward for my brain and my body simply wasn't being delivered.
And it worked.
---
My theory for the method of operation goes something like this:
My brain was used to pushing the button and receiving candy, and it needed that candy (or at least it thought that it did).
But this was disruptive of that: The button was still there and I could push it freely. But no matter how many times I pushed it, no candy was received. This went on just long enough that I no longer felt compelled to need candy (because nicotine addiction had enough time to fade out).
I would have never thought that people would be stupid enough to try this for real, but here we are...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
Vaping can be difficult to stop because:
- it's more accepted
- it's smoother on the throat, and there's plenty of tastes.
- there is no "dose", if you want to you can just vape non stop, and you can pace yourself. With a cigarette, you can't smoke slowly, or you'll loose half the cigarette.
All in all, it's just more convenient and cheaper to vape. If you're hooked, I can see it quite a challenge to stop. You can always say : "oh I am just taking x drags a day".
Personnally I didn't like vaping much, cause it was the beginning, the tastes were weird, the gear was not great battery-wise. So I kept going back to smoking. Eventually going cold turkey from cigarettes was way easier than through vaping.
Not saying it's the best way to stop, quitting cigarettes has been proven to be very diffult. But GP branding those people as stupid is a bit harsh imo.
When it became common knowledge that second hand smoke is bad restrictions came into place.
https://gwern.net/nicotine#addictiveness
Step by step, I feel like it might actually stick for real this time. Every time I started up again in the past was contextual (eg a break up, out for drinks with friends, have a half drunk smoke and I’m hooked again). No longer have any smoker friends, no longer have significant drama in my life, hoping it’ll work out.
Recently I got the urge to try vaping again, bought all the paraphernalia and started vaping like a chimney 24/7. Got light nicotine poisoning as well. After two days, I caught myself compulsively reaching for the vape.
So I threw everything away and I’m back to patches. Took me a week to forget the compulsive hand-to-mouth urge. I now believe intradermal nicotine is the superior method of administration. At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
But yes, it’s certainly less bad than getting the same amount of nicotine by smoking tobacco.
In my experience: no, you don't. You just arrange your life around the fact that you need to smoke all the time.
if anything, the strong smell and taste sensations makes it even more addictive
He'd go through something like 80 Embassy back then, a day. He gave up in 1984ish and is still trundling along. His Dad died at age 60 of lung cancer.
I gave up about eight years ago after 30 odd years at roughly 20 a day. I definitely did some damage and will eventually have to find out how much. I don't have a near permanent cough and at least five major bouts of 'flu per year anymore. I did have a short bout of Covid in 2021 and I suspect it might have been really nasty if I was still a smoker then.
This is all pedantic. The point is that you can chain smoke quite a lot if you're dedicated. I've never met anyone who smoked more than two packs a day regularly or maybe three on a crazy night out of drinking and smoking. 4-5 is crazy.
As a kid, I could not breathe in there. This would have been late 70s. No way they could have afforded that habit at today’s prices.
Genetic variation probably has a bigger role than we'd like to admit. There are definitely outliers. I know smokers who lived into their 90s, and non-smokers who died much younger. The sibling comment says they lived into their 70s, which is probably average.
...and then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Health_and_life...
Calment continued smoking in her elderly years until she was 117
I hate this anecdata. I do know these too.
But statistics don't lie. The odd outlier is not relevant. How many times can you roll the dice and win the saving throw? Smoking kills, and when it doesn't it destroys well-being.
Even without the health issues smokers becoming absolute pricks because they didn't get their fix. Or how much imposing their cloud of ash is invasive, even in open air. Did you know that parents going outside to smoke in front of the door thinking of their child is mostly a feel-good thing? The minimal distance to not impact the child is 10m, and that's not counting the nicotine and ash that permeates the skin and clothing, which gets ingested in the next hug or three, leading to significant amounts of nicotine being found in children hair.
I know, I've been there, I've been that guy. Stressing out because I had only two left in the pack on a Sunday. Rushing to buy a pack before the shop closes like my life depended on it. Snapping out when the effects wears off. Leaving the table at restaurants to get my fix. Barely able to get through an entire movie at the cinema, and as soon as credits roll, get out and immediately swallow an entire cigarette in under a minute.
Now that I'm out of it I can see the absolutely disrespectful behaviour, and in a way I understand because I've been there, I've been the addict that can't see how I harm not just me but others too. I've been the addict that keeps the blindfold of denial so that I can continue satisfying my craving.
And now life is _so much_ better without it. Much better energy, focus, willpower, and freedom.
There is _nothing_ positive about smoking. It's death in a tube, plain and simple.
> Her husband introduced her to smoking, offering cigarettes[5]: 4–21 after meals, but she did not smoke outside these post-meal occasions.
Having a cigarette after meals is less than ideal of course, but it's not like it's a pack-a-day habit.
I stopped smoking and started vaping for a while (~1.5 years) and went back to smoking after some bad vape experiences. At some point, even the smell of the liquid would cause me nausea.
My health is surprisingly good despite the habit. I walk every day, and I can do longer cardio without loosing breath or feeling tired. I'm either lucky or sitting on some ticking time bomb that went unnoticed so far.
I definitely recommend not starting on either though.
Genetic lottery for sure. I’m still quitting but it’s not really because of acute or chronic health problems, mostly cost and being tired of stinking all the time.
Out of curiosity how old are you? I remember plenty of places in my younger days where it was commonplace for people to light up their next cig off of their current one pretty much nonstop
My first thought was "That's a no brainer why didn't I think of that".
Then I remembered that I grew up during peak anti-smoking and so they made nicotine out to be some sort of borderline meth boogeyman rather than just extra addictive extra effective caffeine that comes in bad for your health form factors and that all that propaganda got sent straight to long term memory and I was indoctrinated by it at such a young age it didn't even occur to me to think outside the box like that.
Nicotine patches are expensive for what they are but they're basically free compared to meds.
Anyway, I told my psych about my plan, and he agreed there is research indicating nicotine works as a third-line stimulant medication for ADHD. In many modern, Western countries adult ADHD is not even recognized, let alone medicated, so one has to make do with what's available.
In my experience it is almost as effective as amphetamines, with fewer side effects, much longer lasting (a patch lasts 16+ hours), and very cheap - if you get them on ebay from China. Addiction potential is null: addiction is a function of how quickly the effect peaks, and it takes 3 hours. Not even lisdexamfetamine can compare with how unaddictive patches are.
That said, if I had access to prescription amphetamines, I'd go back to them, but I sure don't miss the days all it did was making me incredibly horny and focused scrolling social media all day long. It was a little too effective at keeping me engaged for my own good, so using a subpar medication means learning to live with ADHD, adjusting your life around your own quirk, rather than only relying on the medication to fix everything for you.
https://gwern.net/nicotine
On one hand, yes, nicotine in many ways does deserve the reputation it's received. Then again, a lot of the blame should go more towards smoking rather than nicotine the substance.
Nicotine is highly addictive, but as you mentioned, the delivery method plays a huge role in its addictive potential, and most people don't realize this. The chances that you'll become addicted to patches is incredibly low. If they were that addictive, then they'd likely be way more effective in helping people quit smoking; in reality, it's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of patch users who successfully end up quitting smoking that way. Even with the highest dose patches, the addiction potential is still relatively low because the patches release the nicotine over a very long period of time and make it difficult or impossible to associate the use of the substance with a ritualistic activity like lighting and puffing on a cigarette.
And yeah, it's not a subject you can really bring up with anyone besides recreational drug users. Very few will be receptive to the idea that nicotine has legitimate uses and can be used without getting addicted.
That is a severe understatement. Nicotine is consistently ranked as one of the most addictive drugs, near cocaine and heroin.
Only about 6% nicotine users manage to quit every year.
https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/tobacco-n...
I also note that I was able to quit nicotine cold-turkey after smoking cigarettes for two years. I've never been able to quit caffeine... and -although it is notably shorter in duration- caffeine withdrawal is WAY worse than nicotine withdrawal.
If we're going by anecdote I know way more people who quit caffeine than nicotine.
Given how sloppy you were with the article you implicitly claimed to have read, I have zero confidence in the accuracy of your anecdotes.
> Thank you for checking the source.
Respectfully, why the hell didn't you check it? It's only a couple of pages long. Did you do something dreadfully silly like employ some LLM to "assist" you with your conversation?
The research seems to indicate it's a cancer accelerant -- it doesn't cause cancer directly, but it promotes the growth and spread of existing tumors.
Studies suggest it does this through several pathways including:
(a) preventing cancer cells from self-destructing (b) making tumor cells divide more quickly (c) stimulating the growth of new blood vessels in and around tumors, helping them grow; and (d) helping cancer cells metastasize more easily by increasing mobility via epithelial-mesenchymal transition.
It also lowers the effectiveness of chemo and radiotherapy.
Admittedly, most of these are animal/lab studies, in part because it's hard to design a good study in humans since so many patients also use/used cigarettes and vapes, which confounds the results. Still, there's enough evidence out there to be cautious.
They tell you not to cut them, because that cuts into their profits. It's a sticker. The amount of nicotine you get is directly proportional to the surface area. A step 3 patch is exactly 1/3 the size of a step 1. This makes it extremely easy to control the exact amount to tapper off.
The hard part most people don't get is the addiction is only about 50% physical to the nicotine. Your brain craves the habit regardless of the chemical. Habits suck. People seek help to stop chewing their fingernails. I still go for walks with the regularity of smoking. I can feel it. It builds up. I need to go for a walk. Same as going for a cigarette before.
The problem is that nicotine is not the only addictive substance involved. If it was then you could chew gum, wear patches or whatever and off you go. There is an extremely complicated set of chemicals involved in fag smoke. There is also the habit effect and other complications.
In the end I think that boring old will power is the only way and any trick or tool or whatever that you can deploy to bolster that is how you give up.
My initial plan was to vape but I soon found that unsatisfying and it looked to me like trying to substitute one habit with another.
Once I started stopping, I didn't want to stop! It was extremely hard but I always reminded myself that I had got so far and that that time would be wasted if I had to start again. I followed doubled up time periods - one day, two days, 1/2 a week, a week, a fortnight, a month, two months ("cripes, this might work") and so on.
A mental tool I developed was a couple of mantras: "I don't want to smell" and "I don't want to die". Whenever I felt the cravings I repeated those to myself and I have no idea why but it did work for a while at a time. Gradually the need tailed off (say around two years)
I remember having quite vivid dreams where I would "crack" and start smoking again. I had to do quite a lot of mental verification to prove to myself that it was just a dream. At one point I even smelt my clothes to prove to myself it was all a dream.
We are all different and there is no right or wrong way to quit. One thing we can all agree on is it is hard, very hard but not impossible. Pick a strategy that might work for you and be prepared to change it but please do have a go. It really is worth it.
I’m ADHD boy for sure, and my dad and his younger sister are both very much not like my aunt, who is more like me. Shes in her 80s now, and was the only smoker - literally smoked cartons a week for about as long as I remember.
But I have had the hypothesis (as a layman) that growing around smokers affects the brain of a child, they self-medicate with tobacco, and the cycle continues, and it has for many generations until today when smoking is frowned upon and self-medication is no longer readily available. I don’t think smoking is the cause of all of ADHD, but we’ll eventually learn that dopamine dysfunction has a lot of different causes.
The patches are different, not just because it lacks that same connection to compulsive and ritualistic activity, but it simply doesn't provide the same quick "hit" that makes smoking far more addictive.
On the other hand, someone prone to addictive tendencies probably shouldn't even use the patches. Even the patches can be a gateway to vaping and smoking for such a person. I have simply never been the type to become addicted to any drug or substance, other than the occasional overeating. This isn't to say that I don't have the potential to get hooked on more powerful drugs, but my innate desire to use them is a lot less than I think is average. Even during times where I've habitually drunk copious amounts of alcohol, I've always been able to realize "this kinda sucks so I think I'm gonna stop" and then I just do without really much struggle other than some brain fog for a few days. Similarly, I sometimes use phenibut, and people talk about how easy it is to become dependent on it and how hard it is to get off it, and that hasn't been my experience in the slightest. Someone without a clear objective around how they use substances like that will be much more likely to end up suffering.
That said, the patches are great for focus and anxiety when used in low doses in moderation. I don't necessarily advise that everyone use them as I have, but I also don't think they're anywhere near as harmful as one might assume. I don't feel the need to ever switch to smoking or vapes, or even gums and pouches.
There is almost no good evidence of this. Effect sizes are tiny, if any. Just placebo and anecdotal. The effect is so small it's not even worth it from
The interesting part I think is that physical nicotine addiction only lasts two weeks. It's the smoking ritual that is so potent. I have several ex-smokers in my family who even after decades still have situations where they associate certain cues with smoking.
Vaping tastes great, can be done indoors, doesn’t need an ash tray, and others around you are mildly annoyed vs visibly upset. Cigarettes are the direct opposite of all of those. The added friction could put someone over the hump.
I love cigars for various reasons, but there's no true alternative that's worth while.
To be clear, it's 100%, definitely not good for you - but the level of harm doesn't seem to be even close to cigarettes or chewing tobacco.
The amount consumed is much less, the smoke shouldn't be entering your lungs, and if there are tons of good, "all-natural" tobacco out there without all the additives put in by cigarette companies.
Except they don't:
https://exposetobacco.org/wp-content/uploads/Cigarette-Filte...
There have been calls in the Netherlands (perhaps even at the EU level) to ban filtered cigarettes, for the simple reason that they are misleading and offer no protection, but are harmful to the environment because of the non-degradable micro-plastics.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/volkskrant-magazine/als-deze-moede... (https://archive.ph/O7dpL)
I believe the clinical studies put it at 50% success rate or higher depending on how many weeks you continue the regiment.
For those of you looking to quit tobacco, I think looking toward medical solutions is the way to go. It’s too bad our medical system has incentivized shyness around finding medical solutions.
There are side effects; it can cause stomach bleeding if you don't carefully take it with meals, so if your breakfast is just a cup of coffee you'll need to adjust to consuming food; and it's associated with intensely vivid dreams which can disrupt your sleep. I experienced both but did not find it that bad, I blame myself for playing a bit fast and loose with the mealtime warnings. idk what it costs now but I paid $400 for the full course out of pocket, probably like $750 today with inflation. So, less than 6 months of moderate cigarette use.
It doesn't fix the psychological desire for a 'smoke break'; for about 6 months I chewed gum (ordinary gum, not nicotine) to get past the mental habit of wanting to consume something. Some people reported using a fidget toy to give their hands something to do. My theory is that if you have a severe smoking addition it is probably because nicotine slotted neatly into some pre-existing somatic need, so once you get past the cravings stage it's worth exploring why smoking or vaping became such a big deal for you in the first place.
Worth keeping in mind as a generality that drugs disclose all their side effects even when those side effects are very rare.
What was really incredible though was right from the start I felt fantastic, like I spent all day in a flow state.
The doctor stopped the prescription after (I think) 8 weeks and I didn't start smoking again. Many years later I learned it is prescribed for ADHD and also as an antidepressant.
- Gradually lower the strength of my liquid until it was at the minimum.
- Stop all vaping and switch to nicotine gum
- Gradually increase the time between each gum
- Stop the gum altogether
This process took probably 3 months and tbh it was pretty miserable the whole time. It's 100% worth it tho, You don't realize how much it controls your life until you stop. You will also still get random cravings for a year or two afterwards, Heck it's been 4 years and I still sometimes get dreams where I'm vaping.
For the first year I wanted a cigarette every fucking day.
Years later, I still had dreams where I would light up…
20+ years on, a distant memory.
And then one day they were awesome and relaxing.
Now recreational marijuana (ideally through bong) is way way more appealing than dumb tobacco cigarettes which do nothing, had it during my teenage years and also during my 20s on different ocassions with colleagues/friends and I can see myself having some even now in 40s if I could buy it legally.
I smoked more than a pack a day for probably 7 or 8 years and quit a couple years after college, not quite cold turkey but basically just trying to wait a little longer between each cigarette. Eventually when the last half of the pack is stale and disgusting but you smoke them anyway because they're expensive, you just kind of stop one day. It was many, many years of no nicotine at all before I stopped thinking about it every day though.
Honestly, I didn't miss it once.
For me, it was the requirement to be nicotine free for a few months around a surgery.
I went the patch route and it was a somewhat difficult 3 months, but it has been a blessing not have to clear-out my through every morning or anxiously anticipating stuff like a long flight or train ride.
I also got the "oh shit, I relapsed" dreams for about a year after I quit.
It has been way more than four years for me, and I'll smell some cigarette smoke when I'm in a mood and be all like "Man, wouldn't it be nice if I got me one of those?".
But, I can say the same sort of thing about my reaction to the odor of coffee or caffeinated tea. Despite the fact that the very same place I get my coffee and tea from sells cigarettes -and wouldn't even card me because I'm so very obviously old- I've been able to quit nicotine. I've never been able to quit caffeine.
Smoking seems gross and stupid and self-destructive to me.
Alcohol does nothing for me, I don't understand why people drink alcohol when it's clear they will get a hangover. Sometimes I drink wine or beer but there's nothing appealing about it.
Gambling (casinos, online, sports betting) seems stupid and pointless - it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll lose, it's the whole point of a casino.
I guess I'm just lucky.
Even myself tested his firsts cigarettes.
It was so painful. The body reacts violently when you try to poison it. Severe coughs that people try to hide, trying to appear strong while they could not help it making impulsive movements. It tastes like sh*ht, it burns your lungs. You stink, your clothing and breath stinks.
It takes a lot of concious and painful work in order to force your body into accepting that.
For me it was pure stupidity to make a deliberate effort to get hooked into an addiction, so I just did not continue.
I couldn't help but see that this way. I read a lot so I knew what was coming next. It is like casinos not inviting mathematicians or physicist to conferences, as because of their training, they can see the probabilities inside out and never fall in the emotional trap.
Of course it's smoke you are inhaling. But guess what? Eventually, you get used to it, you learn to ignore the smell and the pain. Because it's just that good. Which is why it's addicting.
> For me it was pure stupidity to make a deliberate effort to get hooked into an addiction.
No one starts smoking (or any addiction) thinking about that. It's always "just to try", they can stop anytime they want, they are strong-willed enough to resist.
If you grew up in a house with smokers, you would not find the smell unusual.
Only the first 2-3 in your life are any kind of challenge to get through, after that it's smooth sailing, unfortunately. For most people.
Count yourself lucky I guess.
(Feeling okay is addictin)
That eventually faded after our careers took us in different directions, and landing remote roles or at places with fewer or no smokers.
I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to quit. Props to anyone who makes the attempt, successfully or otherwise.
The first attempt, quite early on, I hadn't realised how dependent I'd become and thought it would be easy. Sure, I enjoyed vaping, but I didn't "have" to do it. Give it a couple days and I'll be back to normal. Predictably that went poorly.
Various other attempts I'd now look back on as thinking I could outsmart addiction and try to ease out of it, when in reality it was little more than procrastination.
Oh, I'll start to limit the times I vape. Only between certain hours. Or I'll go outside and do it, make it inconvenient and less appealing. I'll buy flavours I don't enjoy as much and change the association.
For me the only way to stop was to accept the unpleasantness of going cold-turkey. I knew going in that the first 48-72 hours would be brutal but that it would get significantly easier afterwards. There's always a reason to delay but everything I attempted short of actually stopping feels like self-deception.
- stop smoking in certain situations (no cigarette at the bus stop, no cigarette after lunch, …)
- allow myself to put out a cigarette halfway when I’m smoking. I lapsed and lit one, but that doesn’t mean I have to finish it.
- try to feel the downsides of the cigarette while smoking. The nicotine high mostly overrides this, but it’s possible to concentrate on the yucky feeling in your mouth, your lungs being burned etc.
- telling myself that I am sure I want to stop smoking at some point in my life so I might as well stop now.
I didn't find the process especially miserable.
I drew it out over several months. The thing I was really surprised by was that when I finally stopped, I still felt withdrawal symptoms, which is a testament to how addictive nicotine is, given what a tiny amount I had reached.
This was my setup: I mixed up 100ml of e-juice in a graduated bottle at whatever strength I was using at the time, somewhere between 15 and 20 mg/ml, can't remember exactly. From that bottle, I would fill a separate 10ml bottle, which I'd use to refill my tank. After refilling the 10ml bottle, I would top up the big bottle with VG/PG back up to 100ml, so diluting by 10%. I was vaping about half a 5ml tank per day at this point, so the 10ml one lasted about 4 days, and I'd top up the tank every morning. The theory being that the stuff in the tank would also get somewhat diluted every time I topped it up, since it would gradually get more of the stuff from the most recent filling of the 10ml bottle.
But somehow I just ended up unconsciously vaping more and with longer puff until I was at one tank per day, and then more than one tank per day.
It's been 9 years since I've quit smoking and still to this day out of nowhere I will have a thought, "ok, quick smoke and on to the next task"
Recently it happened to me and I was wondering if there are just some neural pathways that are permanently wired to that reward function
Cigarettes are ridiculously more addictive. I know this from experience, but also from a study that found that MAOIs (in cigarettes, but not found in vapes) "dramatically increase the motivation to self-administer nicotine in rats."[1]
I had a wickedly difficult time quitting cigarettes, many failed attempts over the course of years. Vaping made quitting tobacco comically easy, and quitting vaping was also comically easy compared to cold turkey. To quit my all-day vaping habit I just...got rid of the vapes and stopped doing it. I thought about it a few times a day for the first few days, and that was it.
People saying to avoid vapes as a cessation tool are committing actual harm, imo. It's like the difference in difficulty between just jumping off a roof versus using a ladder to descend. Yes, ladders are risky, but not as risky as jumping off a roof.
[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593
While never a heavy smoker I absolutely loved vaping: it was the first thing my hand reached for in the morning and the last it let go falling asleep. I went into panics when I couldn't remember where I had left my vape.
I've now managed to further reduce my smoking to only very few cigarettes per day. This might well still be more harmful than vaping all day long, but at least I got rid of my sixth finger (as a friend used to call it) and I can forget about smoking or vaping for many hours a day.
All my friends have moved to vapes, and they vape harder than I smoke, and I was on 20 a day before moving to roll ups.
I need to quit, but don't see vaping as viable.
If you stuck with plain vapes bought through a legal channel, that risk factor would have been absent.
That is what is left if you ignore the big one, which is its addictiveness. By itself that is probably not directly harmful, but the ways of consuming nicotine mostly are. Nicotine pouches carry some health risks, but are obviously not nearly as bad as snus and other crap like that containing tobacco.
As for the nicotine: yes, it's not great for your cardiovascular system. One Juul pod per day probably twice as bad as drinking three Starbucks grande drip coffees. However, the harm reduction of vaping is profound. Smoked tobacco is just devastatingly worse: smoke has carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, acrolein, and these are on top of the radioactive polonium and lead isotopes.
It's crazy seeing a lot of fearmongering (not saying that's what you're doing, but it is certainly a prevailing narrative) about vaping when, per the data, it's the strongest smoking cessation tool available outside prescription drugs.
I don't think I can find a better quote to describe this feeling.
i consume roughly 50mg of nicotine a day through pouches and have no issues quitting cold turkey, often for weeks at a time. its nice to reset your tolerance. but i find it hard to believe others find it so addicting. same with caffeine. do people really get headaches because they miss a coffee?
alcohol is another story tho. it's a lot more enjoyable and thus harder to eliminate without actually replacing it with something else.
I actually prefer and enjoy the slower nicotine delivery of pouches. If the oral fixation is a problem for anyone, they can just leave the pouch in long after it's dead. They're easy to stop using because there's no chasing a "rush". I think it's a superior product design.
I also go long periods of time without pouches, but I will say 50mg a day is quite a lot. I average about four of the 6mg pouches in a day when I even use them at all.
I tapered off alcohol when the anxiety during hangovers and compulsive overeating started to get out of hand. It was a good run. I'll have the occasional seltzer during holidays or events. That genuinely is just one or two to get a slight buzz. I can't feel any euphoria from it anymore, just mild relaxation that eventually progresses back into stress when I go over my limit. A big help in confirming it wasn't "all in my head" was my smartwatch showing my elevated heart rate, low HRV, and bad sleep.
In the end, moderation is key as it's ever been. It's a lot easier when the top (or sometimes only) options are not just beer and cigarettes.
Did you watch too many Marlboro ads? Smokers look like bozo either way.