Tabex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytisine) is what helped me (and my boyfriend) quit smoking after many years (~30) of smoking and several failed attempts to quit using nicotine gum and patches. We have now been smoke-free for over 5 months, which is still not long, but much longer than we have ever lasted before.
It seems strange to me that with all the talk about the importance of quitting smoking that Tabex is not well known. A course of treatment lasts 25 days, costed me €35 for the whole course, you can buy it online, you stop smoking on the 5th day, and it makes quitting a lot easier. Really.
It does still require motivation in certain situations when you used to smoke before (going out drinking, clubbing, etc.) but it's still much easier than with anything else we tried, and after the first couple of weeks your brain rewires itself. Five months in, going out with friends who still smoke, we were both not tempted to take a cigarette from them. This is huge for us.
If you really want to quit smoking and everything else failed so far, give it a try.
If you do buy online, just make sure it's not a counterfeit. I don't have any advice regarding that, we got ours at a pharmacy on a trip to Poland.
The cravings do go away entirely eventually. It took me probably 2-3 years after I quit before the random cravings stopped, I used to want make the smoking motion with my hand and that finally went away as well. It’s a fairly linear drop off I think, you just get them with less and less frequency as time goes on.
It depends where you are in the world. I bought mine at a pharmacy in Poland on a visit, but I've seen reports of people buying online from Poland, and even people buying it on Amazon. You can check out Reddit as well, as I've seen people sharing websites there.
People don't understand that cigarettes are self-limiting because they literally hurt your throat and lungs. Most people simply can't chain smoke and they need about an hour break in between smokes.
With vaping that limit is completely gone. A vaping addiction can keep escalating until you want a puff every 30 seconds, especially once you start breaking down mental barriers like "no vaping indoors" or "no vaping while on the computer", etc.
So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.
This is not true.. you can chain smoke for hours if you get used to smoking. Drunk people do it all the time. When your nicotine addiction ramps up enough you'll get cravings to do that always.
>Most people [...] need about an hour break in between smokes.
I've never seen anything like that. When there's a group of social smokers standing around, it's very common for something like "Oh, I just finished mine and you're only half-way through yours, I'll light up another one to keep you company" to happen. I've seen plenty of people who aren't chain smokers (yet), but can easily go through 2-4 cigarettes in a row if they're suddenly in a stressful situation and smoking "to relax".
>So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.
But that's not a metric that's in any way helpful for a health decision. Nicotine in and of itself is not particularly physically harmful - it's toxic at high doses and elevates heart rate for a bit, but that's about it. The delivery method is what causes most of the harm, and smoking is 100% known to cause a lot of harm in a lot of different ways. And "With vaping that limit is completely gone" is also not accurate. Unlike the Navier-Stokes equations, dopamine receptors don't experience infinite blowup in finite time. So choosing a delivery method based on the amount of nicotine taken daily is not going to change much in terms of addiction (if you're already heavily addicted, you'll remain heavily addicted), but can have a huge impact on physical health.
Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting. For one the amount of nicotine, especially in the US where 5% is the standard, is easily 5-10x the amount from a pack of cigarettes a day.
Second, its much easier to take a puff than it is to find a suitable place to light up a cigarette and smoke for 5-10 minutes. You can very easily end up becoming psychologically conditioned to taking a puff litteraly once every 20 seconds, all day long from waking up to going to bed.
I too have considered picking up smoking to quit vaping. I remember of the times I did, I could smoke 3-4 a day and be fine. I don't know the long term effects of vaping physically, but just mentally the amount of nicotine is absolutely draining and at this point I rather do some damage to my lungs than keep this going.
>Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting.
Sure, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I disagree that "degree of addictiveness" is the metric that's wise to use when choosing a nicotine delivery method. Obviously the #1 choice should be NULL, not smoking at all, but if one is already addicted to nicotine and not ready to quit it at the moment, smoking cigarettes is, as far as we know, the worst option. Even intermittent smoking, or low-volume (like your 3-4 a day) causes non-linear harm. See this paper for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.9... .
Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?
Also nicotine itself is not without harm. I always thought these drugs only affect the brain, but they're metabolized by the whole body and have consequences on all your cells https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/
Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me
>Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?
Not that I know of, and I grant that this is an unknown, and we could end up learning about extremely bad 20-/30-/40-year effects in the future. That said, there are very clear, very significant, and very well studied harms of cigarette smoking. Research is being done on vaping, and so far all harms identified are significantly lower than smoking.
>Also nicotine itself is not without harm.
Sure, and thanks for the paper. I'm not well versed in bio enough to tell the significance of everything in there, but, correct me if I'm wrong, for the most part this is showing there exist harms, but they're not particularly well quantified yet, especially in terms of human subjects? For this to really matter, you'd need to quantify the surplus of nicotine you get from vaping vs. smoking, and then compare the relative harms of those two doses. Could be that 5x the dose causes 5x the harm, or could be that the smoking dose passes some threshold, and 5x the dose from vaping is just marginal additional harm on top of that. And then still compare that to the other differences between smoking and vaping in terms of harm.
Keep in mind 5x the dose is relative to being a pack a day smoker. We're talking 20x if it means smoking 4-5x a day.
Then there is the negative effects of I dunno how many multiples of volume of vape in your throat and lungs, which I assume is non-zero even though I personally believe its 100x better than burning tobacco.
Then there is the question of what that much nicotine does to you mentally, which is equally, if not more important. To put it in perspective, I usually wake up feeling pretty good, with some hopes and dreams of what Ill be doing that day, and Ill take a puff and immediately want to go back to bed for another hour. I cant sit in meetings for more than 5 mins or have conversations with people if it means I cant be vaping. Its like basing your whole life based on whether you get your fix of nicotine or not. Work from office? I don't think so buddy...every ten minutes Id have to go to the bathroom/outside.
I seriously wonder where my life would have been if I never picked up this habit.
Also I want to mention, I feel like there is too much emphasis put on length of life and not enough on quality of life.
If smoking 3-4 a day is far worse on my body BUT it means Im not a nicotine fiend with a brain fog all day every day with zero motivation, Ill take it.
But smoking cigarettes shortens life. Why would you want to promote vaping as improvement on the quality of life? Also, why do you write nicotine fiend - you are aware that tobacco plants contain nicotine? Vaping may be less damaging than smoking. I fail to see how it is healthy anywhere at all. Why do people here on this sub promote either thing as an exclusive or? That makes no sense. People need to stop sugar-coating crap. I also noticed this with weed. Weed users always say how weed is no problem, but it ALSO is a problem. Their brain tricks them into becoming a promo-individual for weed suddenly. Weed changes the brain pattern too.
I think you misread. I am saying vaping 5x the amount of nicotine is far worse mentally. Even if smoking 3-4 a day is worse physically, if I am going to do one or the other, I rather smoke 3-4 a day.
But in general I am saying, even for the quitting smoking/vaping ad campaigns there is not enough emphasis put on how dramatically it reduces your quality of life. Its always about dying of cancer or heart disease and living shorter amount of time 20-40 years down the line. I mean shit in a lot of cases I rather die at 70 than live to 80. Youll feel better EVERY day in a month is a muucch stronger motivation for me.
And "not ready to quit it at the moment" is such a wildly inappropriate dichotomy I really wonder what experience you have which informs your decision to discuss this topic.
They are also absolutely addictive as fuck, BUT I will say because they come in different strengths I found it relatively straight forward to quit them via tapering.
I was using 20 x 10mg per day and then bought strength 9mg, 6mg, 3mg, 1mg quit.
It was much much easier than trying to cold turkey which I also tried.
What? 50mg/ml is the standard? Or am I miscalculating something here? When I switched from cigs to vaping (back in 2012, not really comparable to now, but still), I went with very high nicotine levels of 36mg/ml which was pretty harsh on the throat, and within a year I was at 3mg/ml. Nowadays I’m at zero.
For the disposable vapes, yes it is. 5% salt nic, in the US youd be hard pressed to find lower. Most countries Ive been to limit to 2%, which the US absolutely should do. Its criminal 5% is sold with no alternative.
15ml at 50mg/ml is 750mg of nicotine. That thing would last me a week. A pack if cigs is ~25mg. Per week ~170mg versus 750. Insane
I used to vape the box mods 3mg. It was great, but now I cant go back to it after trying these damn things because the 3mg is almost a joke. Even cigarettes feel like nothing to me compared to these things
For context, I vape because nicotine helps me focus. I'm not going to elaborate on that point because if I do, I'll get about a zillion replies from preachy, argumentative people who don't know anything about me and I just don't have the time for that today.
Anyway, one of those big 5% disposables lasts me about 6 weeks at the rate I use them. I deliberately seek out the high nic content because I don't want to ingest more glycol or whatever than is necessary. Nor do I want to sit there and chain vape all day like I used to back when freebase liquids were all you could get. I can limit my intake to 2-3 puffs every 1-2 hours and that's what works for me.
Good dude, good ole days. These modern vapes are all from the same tobacco companies, hence the craziness. Cant fight em? Join em.
Instead of having to sell cigarettes with throat cancer on the label, they get to make all this colorful brands with an even more insane nicotine delivery system with the "health benefit" of quitting smoking...
Vaping to smoking is like shooting heroin is to doing a line of coke. And I say this as someone who has smoked and vaped.
Smoking is addictive and was kinda hard to quit. Vaping is insanely, insanely addictive and about 100X as hard to quit (for me anyway). It took me about 3 tries to quit smoking. Its taken me about 100 attempts to quit vaping.
Also, you end up vaping all day and night since there is no reason you can't do it anywhere. In the toilet at work? Vaping. In bed at night, Vaping. Jerking off? Vaping.
I had a very different experience. I would start smoking again for various personal but uninteresting reasons and found that it was much easier if I went to vaping for a week or two before quitting completely.
Opposite here. Taken me hundreds of tries to quit smoking (none worked, vaping was the only thing that allowed me to), vaping I sometimes just don’t do, never had that with smoking, where I sometimes switched to menthol so I could keep smoking while sick…
Maybe that's the case for you, but that would make you the exception. In the 80's when and where I grew up, it was very common for adults to estimate cigarette consumption in terms of, "packs per day."
There is probably some truth to what you're saying, but also keep in mind that tobacco contains more active compounds than nicotine alone, including MAO inhibitors in the form of harmala alkaloids. These can synergise with nicotine and make it more addictive.
Also, I'm dubious about your claim that most people need breaks, or at least any more than vapers do. I was a smoker for over a decade. I don't remember ever feeling like "that's enough, my throat hurts". It's just that smoking was triggered by the onset of withdrawal, which begins after about an hour, and becomes urgent after maybe 2-3 hours. So I'd typically smoke at an interval of 1-3 hours depending on how convenient it was to do so. And cigarettes are expensive, so that factors into it too.
Sometimes though, especially when drinking, I could chain smoke for a couple hours straight while hanging out in a park with friends, especially in the summer.
After I switched to vaping though, I have at times ended up puffing so enthusiastically that I've made myself nauseous from the nicotine. So there's certainly a limit there too.
Edit: another interesting thing I've noticed. Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping. It takes several hours longer to become noticeable, and also feels less intense. When smoking, it took me 1 hour to start craving a cigarette, by 3 hours I'm becoming irritable with strong craving, and by 5 hours I'm extremely irritable, light-headed, and the only thing on my mind is smoking, completely incapable of focusing on anything except how to get some cigarettes and how to get to somewhere I can smoke em.
For vaping, it takes me maybe 7-8 hours to get to the 3 hour mark for smoking. I certainly get cravings long before that, maybe starting at 2-3 hours, but I'm able to push it out of my mind much more easily, for much longer. I don't know why this is. My theory is something to do with the lack of MAO inhibitors. It's also possible that it's a pharmacokinetic phenomenon, but that seems counterintuitive. If I'm ingesting higher doses of nicotine compared to smoking, blood levels will take longer to go to zero. But then I should also have higher tolerance, and therefore a higher threshold for the onset of withdrawal, since tolerance and chemical dependence are more or less the same thing.
> Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping.
I noticed this too. I was a chain smoker. I became a chain vaper, managing to quit tobacco in the process.
Eventually, I was able to cold turkey vaping in a way I could never manage with tobacco.
It took being sick for about 2 weeks so I couldn't vape. Once I was better, I just didn't do it again, and it was... actually kind of easy.
Similar situations have happened to me over the years when I was on tobacco, but I could never just walk away like I did with vaping.
Maybe part of it was that, with tobacco, you really organize a lot of your day around it. Going to the store, going outside for breaks, driving a little extra so you can fit in a smoke in the car, etc - vaping can really scramble all that up so you have fewer situational triggers.
If you smoke enough you get over the terrible feeling in your throat and the smell, but those effects are definitely bad enough that they act as a meaningful deterrent to wanting to smoke more.
If I smoke a cigarette now Ill usually regret it cause Ill be thinking about the terrible taste in my mouth the next 20 mins.
Vaping? Its like eating fucking candy with a million different flavors to try when youre bored of one
I've vaped so much I've physically thrown up, and that never happened with smoking. In fact, I've vaped until I've not been able to walk I've been so dizzy.
Vaping is equivalent to shooting heroin or doing crack, it's so much more intense and addictive than smoking. I found quitting smoking to be incredibly easy compared to quitting vaping.
I helped a friend quit vaping with the nicotine patches for smoking. I had to do some math because a vape hit is not 1:1 with a cigarette hit, and found that the highest dose of a patch was too low for her to start, and had to start with a few max dose patches.
Those patches aren't cheap, albeit neither is the addiction either, but just like the jump from cigarettes to nicotine gum is a good jump, so is vape to cigarettes sometimes. It was a long and painful journey for my friend even with my help, so I don't envy anyone with it worse than her (or even less of the addiction)
> cigarettes are self-limiting they literally hurt your throat and lungs
Eh ...
I didn't know many smokers who smoke < 1 pack per day. For those < 1 pack per day, it's mostly b/c they just haven't gotten there yet, but that's where they're headed.
Smokers aren't really going to change their smoking rituals either, just b/c their throat is a little sore or they're short of breath. They just switch to lights and/or menthol, or otherwise find a brand that doesn't punch them in the throat like Marlboro Reds do.
Going longer than usual without a smoke, generally means chain smoking 2 or more to catch up
Once addicted, it really takes a lot of hurt to self-limit. That means being literally sick, realistically.
Personally, I found vaping far easier to quit than cigarettes.
I totally disagree with you here. Cigarettes are by far 100% worse on every level than vaping. Now, I tell people to not do either one, but since you tried to promote vapes over cigarettes here - you did not mention the damage to DNA and the rise in cancer by cigarette smokes. They literally lose many years of their life when smoking. Also, "need an hour break in between smokes", clearly shows that you never saw a chain smoker on a party. They don't need any downtime. They just continue to smoke. Even when coughing.
But also your comment of "pure addiction" is simply wrong, because nicotine is more addictive than what you have in a vape (at the least with regards to level of concentration). I don't know why you think cigarettes would be better anywhere than vaping. It's just wrong. And both should be avoided anyway; people should not fall for the lie that vaping is better, but even less so that cigarettes is better. Why promote damaging substances anyway? Damage to lung cells exist via vaping too. People seem to forget that. They did not even know that asbesto fibers are damaging for a long time.
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.
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.
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, found the taste disgusting (and remember being dizzy) and don't remember my 1st cigarette at all. For the record I dislike as well taste of beer or coffee, got used to wine, which I drink only when visiting father or him visiting me, so totally like twice a year (though it's then multiday affair). It's same with alcohol addiction, drank fairly enough during teenage years, then pretty much stopped completely during 20s (only rarely with colleagues), then around 30 while in China was drinking daily for lunch and dinner 40+ % spirit (baijiu) for months with colleagues, then completely stopped overnight after finding better (but less laid-back) job.
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 (one of them used it during cancer treatment) and I can see myself having some even now in 40s if I could buy it legally.
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Genetic lottery, I think. There are some "addictions" I've been able to give up incredibly easily, and others I still struggle with. Other people have the opposite problem, others still don't have any at all. The older I get, the more I think willpower is a made up concept.
Sadly true, I think. My grandparents gave up smoking at the same time after grandad contracted emphysema. They were the generation that believed smoking was good for them and smoked for 50+ years. My grandma was shocked that she had physical withdrawal symptoms, something she associated with "druggies". But it went away after two weeks. After that my grandma never thought of smoking again and actually became repulsed by smoke. But my grandad never got over it, he craved a cigarette every day for the rest of his life.
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.
Caffeine - I drink tea and coffee, but most of it without caffeine. Sometimes I drink caffeine every morning for a couple of weeks (mountain biking vacation), and then I stop it and feel bad for a day and then I'm back to normal.
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 :|
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.
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.
Not funny. Smoking restrictions weren't put in place because it's addictive, but because it causes cancer. WHO and others are conflating both to restrict vaping, because it's convenient for them. AFAIK there's no strong evidence vaping causes cancer. Is it addictive? Sure, nicotine is. This headline really crossed a line.
I didn't read the headline as a joke. I did this when I was habitually vaping, I switched to cigarettes to make it inconvenient and unpleasant. People definitely clutched their pearls at me like this though, especially other vapers.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 from outside walls, 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 effect 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 could 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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).
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm interested in how addiction is so much more likely in some people than others. For over 20 years I loved to drink all sorts of different things. Once I had kids and hit 40+ it was so unpleasant in the morning so I decided to massively reduce. In the UK drinking is so pervasive. I limited my intake to <=2 drinks per night and never had an issue and would only break that maybe once a year. Recently I decided to reduce it even more. I will have a pint of ale in a pub if I go, but hardly anything else. It really didn't feel that hard.
Again at uni I found lots of people smoked cigs and mj and so I did it too a little bit, but decided after a year or 2 to stop and I've never really done it since. My dad was the same.
I've had the same realisation with certain foods recently and coffee, massively cutting down on sugar, salt and coffee.
Probably my only addiction at the moment is too much scrolling on my phone.
I totally accept this is a huge issue for many people, but no real idea why...
It works for smoking, but I don't think it does as well for vaping? You just can't rationalize the addiction the same way because you don't stink, you probably won't get cancer from it, you do enjoy it to some extent, etc.
While the book does focus on smoking, and uses some of these physical aspects of cigarettes specifically as arguments, the main thrust of the book is actually a framework that generalizes pretty well to dealing with any addiction. For example, https://easypeasymethod.org/ is a simple rewrite of Carr's book for dealing with porn addiction.
So as long as you have your own reasons for why you want to quit vaping (and if you're picking up the book, you probably already do) it can still be helpful. The books from whyquit.com I mentioned in a sibling comment mention some vaping-specific arguments, and they're framed as quitting nicotine in general, not just smoking specifically.
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.
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.
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.
Btw, one thing that helped me a lot are nicotine patches. I've used them for years and helped me reduce smoking down to ~3 cigs/ day, and even stop it for some period.
"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).
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.
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.
Anecdotally, this does work -- whenever I have had a break from nicotine pouches, I have done with cigarettes. The big difference is that with cigarettes you have to excuse yourself to go outside. It's much easier to break the habit this way. Though that might be in part how with nicotine pouches the act is different as well. Note that the nicotine content does go down this way -- I would say that the specific brand of cigarettes I roll are around 8mg in "Zyn" equivalent, which are usually sold in varying strengths from 3 to 12mg. Snus is a similar product sold usually at 8 to 24mg, though specific brands at 48mg exist.
The real challenge is that the difference between one cigarette a day and zero is huge, at least for me. Once you are at one cigarette a day, and e.g. commit to it being after a workday, you start waiting for the end of workday. It's easy to start feeling that the day does not begin until that moment. Real withdrawal starts at around day 3 and takes roughly 21 days for me.
I think smoking cessation products like patches and gum is not really helping either. It's still nicotine. I have wanted to try Varenicline, but it requires a doctor's prescription and (seemingly) "strong enough" dependence. I have hated the idea of paying 100 euros for a doctor's appointment to maybe get a prescription that costs me another 100 euros.
I plan to quit nicotine for good next month, when I submit a dissertation. After roughly 7 years of using snus and nicotine pouches, I have noticed that my gums are retracting, and when I eat food, a lot of it gets stuck at my lower teeth, and there are gaps between my teeth. I would not be surprised if I need braces, and in part wish that would solve the problem -- the gum retraction itself is irrecoverable. I have been waiting for a doctor's appointment to have my teeth checked out for about 6 months now. I can't help but think that in the process of doing my dissertation, I have trashed my health, at least to an extent, and now I'm just waiting to get an assessment how badly. Moving on, I think that whatever I'm about to do next, it should be something that I feel like needs no nicotine for motivation.
I found quitting vaping far harder than quitting smokes, there is near zero friction to vaping.
I quit smoking when it was more socially accepted, it's probably much easier to quit now that a pack costs so much and there are so few places you can do it.
Capitalism runs on addiction. Cigarettes showed how profitable it was to have an addictive product. Vaping just follows this tradition. Whether you choose one or the other (or switch back and forth), you're making someone money. The harm it may cause is a you problem.
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.
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.
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!".
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.
I used supplements with N-acetylcysteine (NAC) to quit smoking a few years ago and it was a surprisingly smooth experience.
Decided to go cold turkey and started taking them a few weeks in advance - and even before the planned date I suddenly started losing the urge to smoke.
AFAIK recent research indicates it helps with addiction to multiple other substances including alcohol.
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.
One thing we need to do is gradually increase the legal age at which one can buy cigarettes, vapes etc. I'd say until it gets to about 26-28 yo, when you're ripe enough to know that it is better not to start at all.
I assume people must vary in how strong an addiction can be as I have smoked cigarettes but have not become addicted to them. I am able to abruptly stop, get mild cravings and be able to ignore them for a few days and the cravings completely subside. I have another friend who did similar. A regular smoker for years who switched between a few alternatives such as pipe, then vape, then just stopped completely and doesn't miss it. Another friend is still smoking into his 40's and is having a hard time stopping. He cut back but still smokes daily.
It's a very psychological addiction. Obviously willpower and compulsiveness vary depending on the person, but whether you believe it is easy to quit or hard to quit, you are right.
The misery of quitting comes from wanting something you cannot have. The trick to avoiding that misery is to truly not want it. Then the only remaining struggle is a few days of noticeable physical symptoms (like having a mild flu, at worst) and the long struggle of trying to not forget why you don't want to smoke or vape or snus.
Anyone wishing to quit should read Alan Carr's book. Don't worry about whether everything in the book is literally true; the point of the book is not to be a list of pedantically true statements; the point of the book is to get you to quit smoking.
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 stopped smoking when my girlfriend got cancer and I switched to vaping. That worked for a year and a half, then my vape fell into mud and I bought a pack of smokes because I had no quick solution and started smoking again.
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.
It's just because cigars (and presumably pipes?) are puffed, not inhaled. You absorb nicotine through the mucus membrane in your mouth (not as much), and otherwise enjoy the flavor. The practice with cigarettes is to inhale into your lungs. You could technically puff a cigarette I guess.
People make a big deal out additives and accelerants, but the carcinogens are 99% from smoke, burning plant matter. In that respect, pure tobacco isn't meaningfully safer. That said if you "puff", that's probably safer, though still risky (mouth cancer, and you're still going to inhale some amount of smoke).
I hate to be a shill for pharma but one of my friends went on Chantix and the results seem incredible to me.
If I recall correctly the clinical studies put it at 50% success rate or higher depending on how many weeks you continue the regiment.
From the outside looking in it looked like it was way less effort and mental strain than other forms of quitting. They basically started taking the drug and by the end they just didn’t want cigarettes anymore.
For those of you looking to quit nicotine, 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.
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.
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."
Yes, there are some potential side effects, some of them very serious like suicidal ideation. The friend of mine who took it discussed that possibility in depth with his psychologist.
Worth keeping in mind as a generality that drugs disclose all their side effects even when those side effects are very rare or temporary.
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 :)
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).
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'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).
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.
I wish authorities would punish smoking in public areas more aggressively. I'm so tired of inhaling smoke or vape clouds when walking the streets or at bus/tram stops. Theoretically you are not supposed to smoke at bus stops, but it isn't enforced (EU/PL). Entering an office building means inhaling poison, unless you can hold your breath, because there is always a crowd of people smoking.
Aggressive laws and enforcement would do wonders, and also encourage potential quitters.
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.
For those of you who believe smoking is all or nothing, here's my experience.
Started smoking at age 11 (yeah Im French), gradually increasing to about a pack a day in my 20s. Reduced to about half a pack in my 30s. Did the vaping thing then, trying cold turkey a few times, without success. Then one day, I just didn't want to smoke anymore, stopped completely. (I was already smoking only half cigarettes for a while, cause I didn't like the feeling anymore). I didn't have urges to smoke at all for years, even when going out, getting drunk. Even with all my colleagues would go out for a cigarettes and I had to stay alone in a room.
Nowadays, I am in a situation where maybe once every two months I go to a party and I smoke a few cigarettes. Maybe over a weekend, I'd smoke a pack, then I don't smoke at all for another two months. If there is no party I don't smoke, if there's one, I may. I have zero urges the next days, I don't even think about it.
I think it's a question of age, maybe I don't go to that many parties anymore, maybe I don't feel the need to relax or to take a break anymore. I am 100% remote, live in the countryside, that might help compared to office work in a big city as I used to do.
I am not advising anyone to pick up smoking after years of stopping.
But I am writing this just to say that to me the usual things that people say about addiction weren't true at all:
- It wasn't difficult to stop (that last time, I'd already tried a few times before and failed). For some reason, it just happened that I didn't want to continue. I didn't have a date, I didn't have a "last cigarette then it's over" moment. I just didn't feel like smoking anymore. It also sort of happened gradually, first I didn't want to smoke entire cigarettes anymore, then I would stop smoking after half a cigarette.
- I smoked and vaped several times since, sometimes for several days in a row, sometimes at my house, I never felt I would go back to by a addicted smoker. My wife also does this, I can tell she's having a bit more of a hard time not smoking again, but she manages too, so I am not the only oddball here.
I never smoked but strangely enough, the biggest success stories
with regards to smoking, came from people who just ... stopped
smoking. And with that I mean completely, cold-turkey.
I understand that this is not possible for everyone, as the brain
works differently and some just have a harder push towards addiction
by default (but also habit). But the most successful quitters I know
of in reallife, more than half a dozen actually, were those who just
decided to quit it. In theory lowering down to e. g. vapes and what
not may help, but I know some who then just went back to their old
habits, and kept on lying to themselves about it. The brain is great
at finding excuses, so people may need to try different ways to handle
the brain. It is not the cigarette as such nor vape or the addiction
as the main problem - it is how the brain works and operates. What is
also interesting is that many people do not even realise that, how they
self-trick themselves into being addicts. (I am aware that it is very
hard to break out of the cycle for many people too; not saying it may
be easy for everyone. Often people have additional problems once in
addiction, financial ones, physical problems, depression and so forth.)
I was always taught it's the nicotine in cigarettes that makes them addictive. But it's actually the action of inhaling from a little stick and exhaling visible smoke/vapour that is most addictive. It's quite curious why that is. I have never used nicotine regularly but I did feel this craving after using a nicotine-free vape for a while.
So if you have to do it, you might as well do the least harmful one, which is not cigarettes. You should also be able to kick the nicotine very easily. It will take a couple of weeks but it's not that hard. Kicking the inhaling and exhaling part is the hard bit.
Yes, it's funny how everyone here is talking about the chemical addiction only.
That is a thing, but there's also the habits you formed over the years. And they can be worse than the chemical craving.
I've greatly reduced my smoking multiple times for days up to a week. And then I forgot one morning and went back to my usual intake. Once I even stopped smoking for 3 days but forgot the 4th and lit one.
You need a plan for the reflexes you've formed too.
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. I feel much stronger euphoric feelings from working out now than I ever did from drinking.
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.
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.
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 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 bring this up every decade because I have never been able to find supporting studies.
Chilis. Nibble a Thai bird chili instead of facing a nicotine fit. Sip some Tabasco if you must.
I quit this way, and the point is not burning your mouth or the heat. It’s the endorphin complement.
Tobacco products out. Capsaicin products in.
Tabex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytisine) is what helped me (and my boyfriend) quit smoking after many years (~30) of smoking and several failed attempts to quit using nicotine gum and patches. We have now been smoke-free for over 5 months, which is still not long, but much longer than we have ever lasted before.
It seems strange to me that with all the talk about the importance of quitting smoking that Tabex is not well known. A course of treatment lasts 25 days, costed me €35 for the whole course, you can buy it online, you stop smoking on the 5th day, and it makes quitting a lot easier. Really.
It does still require motivation in certain situations when you used to smoke before (going out drinking, clubbing, etc.) but it's still much easier than with anything else we tried, and after the first couple of weeks your brain rewires itself. Five months in, going out with friends who still smoke, we were both not tempted to take a cigarette from them. This is huge for us.
If you really want to quit smoking and everything else failed so far, give it a try.
If you do buy online, just make sure it's not a counterfeit. I don't have any advice regarding that, we got ours at a pharmacy on a trip to Poland.
It's an old drug so can't be patented, so nobody will pay for studies on it, which means no health service will approve it.
The cravings do go away entirely eventually. It took me probably 2-3 years after I quit before the random cravings stopped, I used to want make the smoking motion with my hand and that finally went away as well. It’s a fairly linear drop off I think, you just get them with less and less frequency as time goes on.
This so much. I am still confused how well tabex works and how few people know about it.
Combine with a dopamine booster for the first weeks (or masturbate a lot) and quitting suddenly feels easy.
I bought it online but directly from a Polish or Slovakian pharmacy.
Thanks for sharing. I know lots of people who can benefit from this.
Edit: where do people get treatment? My searches aren't giving me anything useful to give to friends trying to quit
It depends where you are in the world. I bought mine at a pharmacy in Poland on a visit, but I've seen reports of people buying online from Poland, and even people buying it on Amazon. You can check out Reddit as well, as I've seen people sharing websites there.
People don't understand that cigarettes are self-limiting because they literally hurt your throat and lungs. Most people simply can't chain smoke and they need about an hour break in between smokes.
With vaping that limit is completely gone. A vaping addiction can keep escalating until you want a puff every 30 seconds, especially once you start breaking down mental barriers like "no vaping indoors" or "no vaping while on the computer", etc.
So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.
This is not true.. you can chain smoke for hours if you get used to smoking. Drunk people do it all the time. When your nicotine addiction ramps up enough you'll get cravings to do that always.
Are you speaking at all from experience?
>Most people [...] need about an hour break in between smokes.
I've never seen anything like that. When there's a group of social smokers standing around, it's very common for something like "Oh, I just finished mine and you're only half-way through yours, I'll light up another one to keep you company" to happen. I've seen plenty of people who aren't chain smokers (yet), but can easily go through 2-4 cigarettes in a row if they're suddenly in a stressful situation and smoking "to relax".
>So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.
But that's not a metric that's in any way helpful for a health decision. Nicotine in and of itself is not particularly physically harmful - it's toxic at high doses and elevates heart rate for a bit, but that's about it. The delivery method is what causes most of the harm, and smoking is 100% known to cause a lot of harm in a lot of different ways. And "With vaping that limit is completely gone" is also not accurate. Unlike the Navier-Stokes equations, dopamine receptors don't experience infinite blowup in finite time. So choosing a delivery method based on the amount of nicotine taken daily is not going to change much in terms of addiction (if you're already heavily addicted, you'll remain heavily addicted), but can have a huge impact on physical health.
Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting. For one the amount of nicotine, especially in the US where 5% is the standard, is easily 5-10x the amount from a pack of cigarettes a day.
Second, its much easier to take a puff than it is to find a suitable place to light up a cigarette and smoke for 5-10 minutes. You can very easily end up becoming psychologically conditioned to taking a puff litteraly once every 20 seconds, all day long from waking up to going to bed.
I too have considered picking up smoking to quit vaping. I remember of the times I did, I could smoke 3-4 a day and be fine. I don't know the long term effects of vaping physically, but just mentally the amount of nicotine is absolutely draining and at this point I rather do some damage to my lungs than keep this going.
>Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting.
Sure, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I disagree that "degree of addictiveness" is the metric that's wise to use when choosing a nicotine delivery method. Obviously the #1 choice should be NULL, not smoking at all, but if one is already addicted to nicotine and not ready to quit it at the moment, smoking cigarettes is, as far as we know, the worst option. Even intermittent smoking, or low-volume (like your 3-4 a day) causes non-linear harm. See this paper for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.9... .
Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?
Also nicotine itself is not without harm. I always thought these drugs only affect the brain, but they're metabolized by the whole body and have consequences on all your cells https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/ Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me
>Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?
Not that I know of, and I grant that this is an unknown, and we could end up learning about extremely bad 20-/30-/40-year effects in the future. That said, there are very clear, very significant, and very well studied harms of cigarette smoking. Research is being done on vaping, and so far all harms identified are significantly lower than smoking.
>Also nicotine itself is not without harm.
Sure, and thanks for the paper. I'm not well versed in bio enough to tell the significance of everything in there, but, correct me if I'm wrong, for the most part this is showing there exist harms, but they're not particularly well quantified yet, especially in terms of human subjects? For this to really matter, you'd need to quantify the surplus of nicotine you get from vaping vs. smoking, and then compare the relative harms of those two doses. Could be that 5x the dose causes 5x the harm, or could be that the smoking dose passes some threshold, and 5x the dose from vaping is just marginal additional harm on top of that. And then still compare that to the other differences between smoking and vaping in terms of harm.
Keep in mind 5x the dose is relative to being a pack a day smoker. We're talking 20x if it means smoking 4-5x a day.
Then there is the negative effects of I dunno how many multiples of volume of vape in your throat and lungs, which I assume is non-zero even though I personally believe its 100x better than burning tobacco.
Then there is the question of what that much nicotine does to you mentally, which is equally, if not more important. To put it in perspective, I usually wake up feeling pretty good, with some hopes and dreams of what Ill be doing that day, and Ill take a puff and immediately want to go back to bed for another hour. I cant sit in meetings for more than 5 mins or have conversations with people if it means I cant be vaping. Its like basing your whole life based on whether you get your fix of nicotine or not. Work from office? I don't think so buddy...every ten minutes Id have to go to the bathroom/outside. I seriously wonder where my life would have been if I never picked up this habit.
We'll see in another 10-20 years I suppose.
Also I want to mention, I feel like there is too much emphasis put on length of life and not enough on quality of life.
If smoking 3-4 a day is far worse on my body BUT it means Im not a nicotine fiend with a brain fog all day every day with zero motivation, Ill take it.
But smoking cigarettes shortens life. Why would you want to promote vaping as improvement on the quality of life? Also, why do you write nicotine fiend - you are aware that tobacco plants contain nicotine? Vaping may be less damaging than smoking. I fail to see how it is healthy anywhere at all. Why do people here on this sub promote either thing as an exclusive or? That makes no sense. People need to stop sugar-coating crap. I also noticed this with weed. Weed users always say how weed is no problem, but it ALSO is a problem. Their brain tricks them into becoming a promo-individual for weed suddenly. Weed changes the brain pattern too.
I think you misread. I am saying vaping 5x the amount of nicotine is far worse mentally. Even if smoking 3-4 a day is worse physically, if I am going to do one or the other, I rather smoke 3-4 a day.
But in general I am saying, even for the quitting smoking/vaping ad campaigns there is not enough emphasis put on how dramatically it reduces your quality of life. Its always about dying of cancer or heart disease and living shorter amount of time 20-40 years down the line. I mean shit in a lot of cases I rather die at 70 than live to 80. Youll feel better EVERY day in a month is a muucch stronger motivation for me.
Addiction is a disease, not a "choice"
And "not ready to quit it at the moment" is such a wildly inappropriate dichotomy I really wonder what experience you have which informs your decision to discuss this topic.
Have you tried nic pouches like zyn's instead?
They are also absolutely addictive as fuck, BUT I will say because they come in different strengths I found it relatively straight forward to quit them via tapering.
I was using 20 x 10mg per day and then bought strength 9mg, 6mg, 3mg, 1mg quit.
It was much much easier than trying to cold turkey which I also tried.
> where 5% is the standard
What? 50mg/ml is the standard? Or am I miscalculating something here? When I switched from cigs to vaping (back in 2012, not really comparable to now, but still), I went with very high nicotine levels of 36mg/ml which was pretty harsh on the throat, and within a year I was at 3mg/ml. Nowadays I’m at zero.
For the disposable vapes, yes it is. 5% salt nic, in the US youd be hard pressed to find lower. Most countries Ive been to limit to 2%, which the US absolutely should do. Its criminal 5% is sold with no alternative.
Im not going to link you 500 products but heres a pretty standard vape sold. You can check the rest of the products, theyre almost all 5% with no other option https://vapordna.com/products/flum-melo-20000-puffs-disposab...
15ml at 50mg/ml is 750mg of nicotine. That thing would last me a week. A pack if cigs is ~25mg. Per week ~170mg versus 750. Insane
I used to vape the box mods 3mg. It was great, but now I cant go back to it after trying these damn things because the 3mg is almost a joke. Even cigarettes feel like nothing to me compared to these things
Yes, but a market with only 5% is more likely to generate addicts, err, I mean, higher ARR.
For context, I vape because nicotine helps me focus. I'm not going to elaborate on that point because if I do, I'll get about a zillion replies from preachy, argumentative people who don't know anything about me and I just don't have the time for that today.
Anyway, one of those big 5% disposables lasts me about 6 weeks at the rate I use them. I deliberately seek out the high nic content because I don't want to ingest more glycol or whatever than is necessary. Nor do I want to sit there and chain vape all day like I used to back when freebase liquids were all you could get. I can limit my intake to 2-3 puffs every 1-2 hours and that's what works for me.
Of course it helps you focus. Thats a known fact. Its incredible you can do only few puffs every hour or two. No judgement from me.
I keep finding out about new crazyness for modern vapes. That’s insane. I’ll keep vaping at 0 nic with hand-built coils and DIY mixed liquids ;)
Good dude, good ole days. These modern vapes are all from the same tobacco companies, hence the craziness. Cant fight em? Join em.
Instead of having to sell cigarettes with throat cancer on the label, they get to make all this colorful brands with an even more insane nicotine delivery system with the "health benefit" of quitting smoking...
Dont ever ever try this crap.
Vaping to smoking is like shooting heroin is to doing a line of coke. And I say this as someone who has smoked and vaped.
Smoking is addictive and was kinda hard to quit. Vaping is insanely, insanely addictive and about 100X as hard to quit (for me anyway). It took me about 3 tries to quit smoking. Its taken me about 100 attempts to quit vaping.
Also, you end up vaping all day and night since there is no reason you can't do it anywhere. In the toilet at work? Vaping. In bed at night, Vaping. Jerking off? Vaping.
It's just insanely bad.
I had a very different experience. I would start smoking again for various personal but uninteresting reasons and found that it was much easier if I went to vaping for a week or two before quitting completely.
Opposite here. Taken me hundreds of tries to quit smoking (none worked, vaping was the only thing that allowed me to), vaping I sometimes just don’t do, never had that with smoking, where I sometimes switched to menthol so I could keep smoking while sick…
Maybe that's the case for you, but that would make you the exception. In the 80's when and where I grew up, it was very common for adults to estimate cigarette consumption in terms of, "packs per day."
There is probably some truth to what you're saying, but also keep in mind that tobacco contains more active compounds than nicotine alone, including MAO inhibitors in the form of harmala alkaloids. These can synergise with nicotine and make it more addictive.
Also, I'm dubious about your claim that most people need breaks, or at least any more than vapers do. I was a smoker for over a decade. I don't remember ever feeling like "that's enough, my throat hurts". It's just that smoking was triggered by the onset of withdrawal, which begins after about an hour, and becomes urgent after maybe 2-3 hours. So I'd typically smoke at an interval of 1-3 hours depending on how convenient it was to do so. And cigarettes are expensive, so that factors into it too.
Sometimes though, especially when drinking, I could chain smoke for a couple hours straight while hanging out in a park with friends, especially in the summer.
After I switched to vaping though, I have at times ended up puffing so enthusiastically that I've made myself nauseous from the nicotine. So there's certainly a limit there too.
Edit: another interesting thing I've noticed. Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping. It takes several hours longer to become noticeable, and also feels less intense. When smoking, it took me 1 hour to start craving a cigarette, by 3 hours I'm becoming irritable with strong craving, and by 5 hours I'm extremely irritable, light-headed, and the only thing on my mind is smoking, completely incapable of focusing on anything except how to get some cigarettes and how to get to somewhere I can smoke em.
For vaping, it takes me maybe 7-8 hours to get to the 3 hour mark for smoking. I certainly get cravings long before that, maybe starting at 2-3 hours, but I'm able to push it out of my mind much more easily, for much longer. I don't know why this is. My theory is something to do with the lack of MAO inhibitors. It's also possible that it's a pharmacokinetic phenomenon, but that seems counterintuitive. If I'm ingesting higher doses of nicotine compared to smoking, blood levels will take longer to go to zero. But then I should also have higher tolerance, and therefore a higher threshold for the onset of withdrawal, since tolerance and chemical dependence are more or less the same thing.
> Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping.
I noticed this too. I was a chain smoker. I became a chain vaper, managing to quit tobacco in the process.
Eventually, I was able to cold turkey vaping in a way I could never manage with tobacco.
It took being sick for about 2 weeks so I couldn't vape. Once I was better, I just didn't do it again, and it was... actually kind of easy.
Similar situations have happened to me over the years when I was on tobacco, but I could never just walk away like I did with vaping.
Maybe part of it was that, with tobacco, you really organize a lot of your day around it. Going to the store, going outside for breaks, driving a little extra so you can fit in a smoke in the car, etc - vaping can really scramble all that up so you have fewer situational triggers.
If you smoke enough you get over the terrible feeling in your throat and the smell, but those effects are definitely bad enough that they act as a meaningful deterrent to wanting to smoke more.
If I smoke a cigarette now Ill usually regret it cause Ill be thinking about the terrible taste in my mouth the next 20 mins.
Vaping? Its like eating fucking candy with a million different flavors to try when youre bored of one
I've vaped so much I've physically thrown up, and that never happened with smoking. In fact, I've vaped until I've not been able to walk I've been so dizzy.
Vaping is equivalent to shooting heroin or doing crack, it's so much more intense and addictive than smoking. I found quitting smoking to be incredibly easy compared to quitting vaping.
> Vaping is equivalent to shooting heroin or doing crack
That’s a feature of the juice the mainstream products come with, not of vaping in general.
I helped a friend quit vaping with the nicotine patches for smoking. I had to do some math because a vape hit is not 1:1 with a cigarette hit, and found that the highest dose of a patch was too low for her to start, and had to start with a few max dose patches.
Those patches aren't cheap, albeit neither is the addiction either, but just like the jump from cigarettes to nicotine gum is a good jump, so is vape to cigarettes sometimes. It was a long and painful journey for my friend even with my help, so I don't envy anyone with it worse than her (or even less of the addiction)
> Most people simply can't chain smoke and they need about an hour break in between smokes.
Major skill issue.
> cigarettes are self-limiting they literally hurt your throat and lungs
Eh ...
I didn't know many smokers who smoke < 1 pack per day. For those < 1 pack per day, it's mostly b/c they just haven't gotten there yet, but that's where they're headed.
Smokers aren't really going to change their smoking rituals either, just b/c their throat is a little sore or they're short of breath. They just switch to lights and/or menthol, or otherwise find a brand that doesn't punch them in the throat like Marlboro Reds do.
Going longer than usual without a smoke, generally means chain smoking 2 or more to catch up
Once addicted, it really takes a lot of hurt to self-limit. That means being literally sick, realistically.
Personally, I found vaping far easier to quit than cigarettes.
I totally disagree with you here. Cigarettes are by far 100% worse on every level than vaping. Now, I tell people to not do either one, but since you tried to promote vapes over cigarettes here - you did not mention the damage to DNA and the rise in cancer by cigarette smokes. They literally lose many years of their life when smoking. Also, "need an hour break in between smokes", clearly shows that you never saw a chain smoker on a party. They don't need any downtime. They just continue to smoke. Even when coughing.
But also your comment of "pure addiction" is simply wrong, because nicotine is more addictive than what you have in a vape (at the least with regards to level of concentration). I don't know why you think cigarettes would be better anywhere than vaping. It's just wrong. And both should be avoided anyway; people should not fall for the lie that vaping is better, but even less so that cigarettes is better. Why promote damaging substances anyway? Damage to lung cells exist via vaping too. People seem to forget that. They did not even know that asbesto fibers are damaging for a long time.
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.
Stopped smoking cold turkey when my first daughter was born.
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.
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.
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.
Good for him.
Stay that way. Your first cigarette will never let you forget it.
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…
Yeah, same for me—the first dozen or so sucked.
And then one day they were awesome and relaxing.
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.
I had maybe 10 cigarettes lifetime. Haven’t had one in a decade.
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, found the taste disgusting (and remember being dizzy) and don't remember my 1st cigarette at all. For the record I dislike as well taste of beer or coffee, got used to wine, which I drink only when visiting father or him visiting me, so totally like twice a year (though it's then multiday affair). It's same with alcohol addiction, drank fairly enough during teenage years, then pretty much stopped completely during 20s (only rarely with colleagues), then around 30 while in China was drinking daily for lunch and dinner 40+ % spirit (baijiu) for months with colleagues, then completely stopped overnight after finding better (but less laid-back) job.
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 (one of them used it during cancer treatment) and I can see myself having some even now in 40s if I could buy it legally.
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.
Honestly, I didn't miss it once.
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
I don't know if that last line was meant to be funny, but it gave me a good laugh. We should all be so "lucky!"
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.
Yeah, sometimes the whiff of cigarette smoke from a passing stranger puts a small, guilty smile on my face.
Having a motivation, even minor, helps a lot.
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.
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.
I combined a couple of methods:
- 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.
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.
thats how we all get started. its a social thing, your in or your out. sucks. but its what it is.
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.
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.
Tabex (laburnum extract), something to boost dopamin for the first weeks and probably the actual will to do so. Quitting was actually easy that way.
Thank you. A similar regiment also works for digital technologies
Good for you, friend! You should feel proud.
> 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.
How do people not just do the easy pleasurable thing? I am incredibly prone to addictions and I don't understand how some people aren't.
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.
> Because it is not pleasurable at all?
There wouldn't be a trillion-dollar market for tobacco if it was "not pleasurable at all". Your personal experience isn't universal, man.
> It takes a lot of concious and painful work in order to force your body into accepting that.
Of course it does! But guess what? It feels sooo goood that people get addicted to it!
Genetic lottery, I think. There are some "addictions" I've been able to give up incredibly easily, and others I still struggle with. Other people have the opposite problem, others still don't have any at all. The older I get, the more I think willpower is a made up concept.
Sadly true, I think. My grandparents gave up smoking at the same time after grandad contracted emphysema. They were the generation that believed smoking was good for them and smoked for 50+ years. My grandma was shocked that she had physical withdrawal symptoms, something she associated with "druggies". But it went away after two weeks. After that my grandma never thought of smoking again and actually became repulsed by smoke. But my grandad never got over it, he craved a cigarette every day for the rest of his life.
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.
Caffeine - I drink tea and coffee, but most of it without caffeine. Sometimes I drink caffeine every morning for a couple of weeks (mountain biking vacation), and then I stop it and feel bad for a day and then I'm back to normal.
I guess I'm just lucky.
Probably the same way normies view us who spend time reading and commenting to semi-hostile strangers on the internet.
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 :|
Impulse control?
How are you right now not drunk while munching on cake and playing an online slot machine?
What makes you think I'm not?
Honestly? I think it's just a mindset.
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.
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 didn't find the process especially miserable.
What have you done to replace the receptor-clearing capability nicotine has that likely “addicted” you in the first place?
(Feeling okay is addictive.)
Not funny. Smoking restrictions weren't put in place because it's addictive, but because it causes cancer. WHO and others are conflating both to restrict vaping, because it's convenient for them. AFAIK there's no strong evidence vaping causes cancer. Is it addictive? Sure, nicotine is. This headline really crossed a line.
How many years of society-wide usage did it take to gather the evidence to understand the health impacts of smoking?
I didn't read the headline as a joke. I did this when I was habitually vaping, I switched to cigarettes to make it inconvenient and unpleasant. People definitely clutched their pearls at me like this though, especially other vapers.
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...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
I am reminded of: https://theonion.com/new-smokable-nicotine-sticks-can-they-h...
That was hilarious but I hate how hard The Onion has to compete with reality now.
Bonus virtue-signaling points for "plant-based alternative", although I had a different plant in mind when I read that phrase.
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.
Heroin is even less accepted, offers less tastes and is more serious about correct dose.
Heroin does nothing for nicotine addiction, heroine addicts typically smoke as well.
do I really have to mention that vaping and smoking use the same chemical addiction in comparable doses?
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.
You're missing the very basic point that taking up cigarettes is just as bad and likely considerably worse.
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.
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.
https://gwern.net/nicotine#addictiveness
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?
People are even vaping on public transit nowadays. Never seen that for smoking.
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.
You must be young.
They appear to think that cigarettes smell bad, yet their nicotine infusused fruit salad/cotton candy monstrosity is fine.
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.
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.
> 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've been a heavy cigarette smoker for 12 years (pack a day min.). When I switched to vaping, I vaped continuously the entire day.
There is no human on earth that can smoke continuously the entire day for very long. A pack a day smoker means smoking one every ~30 minutes circa.
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.
That is crazy. How long did they live? It would be fascinating if someone could live a long life despite smoking so much
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.
...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
The data is pretty clear. The existence of outliers does not change this.
> 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 from outside walls, 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 effect 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 could 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.
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.
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.
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.
had one lung removed, and the other was probably close to worthless from smoking
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.
Smoking was so huge in Britain. People think smoking was big in America, but the UK it's like a culture in and of itself
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
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.
> 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
It's just lighting and inhaling. It does not take any extra time
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.
it also stops being unpleasant once your brain has associated it deeply with the dopamine
if anything, the strong smell and taste sensations makes it even more addictive
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
No evidence that nicotine is a stimulant? What?
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.
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 smoked my first cigarette at 6, really started at 13 and smoked 2 packs a day for 30 years. Patches are the best way.
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.
How did you taper off patches? Are you still on them?
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 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).
ADHD people get hooked to smoking quite easily. Nicotine's a stimulant after all.
Isn't that way shorter acting ?
And carcinogenic
What is?
>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.
Nicotine isn't just 'extra effective caffeine.'
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.
> rather than just extra addictive extra effective caffeine
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...
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.
You:
Your linked article: 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.
Thank you for checking the source. Celebrating that is more important than me being right so kudos.
If we're going by anecdote I know way more people who quit caffeine than nicotine.
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've come to a similar conclusion.
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.
as a medication alternative there's saffron, which also helps (not as good)
Did you read gwerns post on it by any chance?
https://gwern.net/nicotine
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.
I'm interested in how addiction is so much more likely in some people than others. For over 20 years I loved to drink all sorts of different things. Once I had kids and hit 40+ it was so unpleasant in the morning so I decided to massively reduce. In the UK drinking is so pervasive. I limited my intake to <=2 drinks per night and never had an issue and would only break that maybe once a year. Recently I decided to reduce it even more. I will have a pint of ale in a pub if I go, but hardly anything else. It really didn't feel that hard.
Again at uni I found lots of people smoked cigs and mj and so I did it too a little bit, but decided after a year or 2 to stop and I've never really done it since. My dad was the same.
I've had the same realisation with certain foods recently and coffee, massively cutting down on sugar, salt and coffee.
Probably my only addiction at the moment is too much scrolling on my phone.
I totally accept this is a huge issue for many people, but no real idea why...
For anyone looking to quit, I recommend Allen Carr's Easy Way to Quit Smoking. Helped multiple people in my life with addiction
Another good resource is whyquit.com
They have three books that follow a similar method as Carr's book. All resources available free, in multiple translations:
The original, Never Take Another Puff: https://whyquit.com/joel/index-ebook.html
Freedom From Nicotine, a more modern take, with a lot of data and references: https://whyquit.com/ffn/
Smart Turkey, essentially a condensed, much shorter version of FFN: https://whyquit.com/smart/
It works for smoking, but I don't think it does as well for vaping? You just can't rationalize the addiction the same way because you don't stink, you probably won't get cancer from it, you do enjoy it to some extent, etc.
While the book does focus on smoking, and uses some of these physical aspects of cigarettes specifically as arguments, the main thrust of the book is actually a framework that generalizes pretty well to dealing with any addiction. For example, https://easypeasymethod.org/ is a simple rewrite of Carr's book for dealing with porn addiction.
So as long as you have your own reasons for why you want to quit vaping (and if you're picking up the book, you probably already do) it can still be helpful. The books from whyquit.com I mentioned in a sibling comment mention some vaping-specific arguments, and they're framed as quitting nicotine in general, not just smoking specifically.
Did a cigarette write this article?
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
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.
It is like I have been standing my whole life, and I just sat down.
I don't think I can find a better quote to describe this feeling.
I’m with you 100%. We’ll see if the last step goes ok next month after the MAOI is all cleared.
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 lived near 20 years in a country where cigarettes are cheap and not stigmatised. Coming back home, I've found I'm one of the few smokers left.
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.
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.
Btw, one thing that helped me a lot are nicotine patches. I've used them for years and helped me reduce smoking down to ~3 cigs/ day, and even stop it for some period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Butts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_O%27Teen
"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).
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.
Yeah, it’s almost like these vape companies have no motivation to help you wean yourself off their product.
its regulation. in jurisdictions where its not regulated you can often purchase a reusable, refillable vape for the same price as a disposable
>Nicotine addiction is a terrible enslavement.
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.
Doesn’t make much sense, though, has anyone looked at the price of cigarettes?
Anecdotally, this does work -- whenever I have had a break from nicotine pouches, I have done with cigarettes. The big difference is that with cigarettes you have to excuse yourself to go outside. It's much easier to break the habit this way. Though that might be in part how with nicotine pouches the act is different as well. Note that the nicotine content does go down this way -- I would say that the specific brand of cigarettes I roll are around 8mg in "Zyn" equivalent, which are usually sold in varying strengths from 3 to 12mg. Snus is a similar product sold usually at 8 to 24mg, though specific brands at 48mg exist.
The real challenge is that the difference between one cigarette a day and zero is huge, at least for me. Once you are at one cigarette a day, and e.g. commit to it being after a workday, you start waiting for the end of workday. It's easy to start feeling that the day does not begin until that moment. Real withdrawal starts at around day 3 and takes roughly 21 days for me.
I think smoking cessation products like patches and gum is not really helping either. It's still nicotine. I have wanted to try Varenicline, but it requires a doctor's prescription and (seemingly) "strong enough" dependence. I have hated the idea of paying 100 euros for a doctor's appointment to maybe get a prescription that costs me another 100 euros.
I plan to quit nicotine for good next month, when I submit a dissertation. After roughly 7 years of using snus and nicotine pouches, I have noticed that my gums are retracting, and when I eat food, a lot of it gets stuck at my lower teeth, and there are gaps between my teeth. I would not be surprised if I need braces, and in part wish that would solve the problem -- the gum retraction itself is irrecoverable. I have been waiting for a doctor's appointment to have my teeth checked out for about 6 months now. I can't help but think that in the process of doing my dissertation, I have trashed my health, at least to an extent, and now I'm just waiting to get an assessment how badly. Moving on, I think that whatever I'm about to do next, it should be something that I feel like needs no nicotine for motivation.
I found quitting vaping far harder than quitting smokes, there is near zero friction to vaping.
I quit smoking when it was more socially accepted, it's probably much easier to quit now that a pack costs so much and there are so few places you can do it.
I really recommend Nicorette inhalers, that's how I quit smoking. Having something to do with the hands really helps I think.
Also just inhaling through an empty tube helps! Make the smoking motion with your hand, inhale and get a nice hit of oxygen.
It's about 30 years ago that I quit smoking but it was a real bugger at the time.
Here's what helped me the most; every time you try to quit it gets a bit easier next time.
So if you try and fail, try again. Then keep trying after that.
So many people try to quit and get disheartened when they're pulled back.
Instead just think of it as another step along the path. You are training yourself to tolerate the itch and to do without nicotine.
Capitalism runs on addiction. Cigarettes showed how profitable it was to have an addictive product. Vaping just follows this tradition. Whether you choose one or the other (or switch back and forth), you're making someone money. The harm it may cause is a you problem.
Cytisine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytisine ) doesn't get much attention.
It's extremely effective at reducing nicotine cravings and withdrawal symptoms.
Moreover, European pharmacy formulations are available "OTC" from Amazon in the USA because its not a recognized drug there
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?
Every day we stray further from god, etc, etc.
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.
Thanks for the confirmation!
You can get Propylene Glycol or vegetable glycerin and vape that.
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.
Whoa there.
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.
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!".
That’s how I did it and what I recommend to my friends (who vape constantly). It’s two habits you have to beat, why not do them one at a time?
It's apparently a thing, "nicotine free" vaping
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.
Here's a company with a product meant specifically for this. [0]
[0]: https://tryfum.com
I used supplements with N-acetylcysteine (NAC) to quit smoking a few years ago and it was a surprisingly smooth experience.
Decided to go cold turkey and started taking them a few weeks in advance - and even before the planned date I suddenly started losing the urge to smoke.
AFAIK recent research indicates it helps with addiction to multiple other substances including alcohol.
Had a cousin that was trying to use vape to get off of cigarettes, but it wasn't going well. The new plan was to move to the South grow tobacco.
no kidding . ppl have been trying to look for cig alternatives forever. If vaping worked as well, it would be everywhere. It's still a small niche.
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.
One thing we need to do is gradually increase the legal age at which one can buy cigarettes, vapes etc. I'd say until it gets to about 26-28 yo, when you're ripe enough to know that it is better not to start at all.
Famously, high schoolers and middle schoolers never drink or vape.
I assume people must vary in how strong an addiction can be as I have smoked cigarettes but have not become addicted to them. I am able to abruptly stop, get mild cravings and be able to ignore them for a few days and the cravings completely subside. I have another friend who did similar. A regular smoker for years who switched between a few alternatives such as pipe, then vape, then just stopped completely and doesn't miss it. Another friend is still smoking into his 40's and is having a hard time stopping. He cut back but still smokes daily.
It's a very psychological addiction. Obviously willpower and compulsiveness vary depending on the person, but whether you believe it is easy to quit or hard to quit, you are right.
The misery of quitting comes from wanting something you cannot have. The trick to avoiding that misery is to truly not want it. Then the only remaining struggle is a few days of noticeable physical symptoms (like having a mild flu, at worst) and the long struggle of trying to not forget why you don't want to smoke or vape or snus.
Anyone wishing to quit should read Alan Carr's book. Don't worry about whether everything in the book is literally true; the point of the book is not to be a list of pedantically true statements; the point of the book is to get you to quit smoking.
Asocial junkies either way, poisoning the air whereever they go.
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.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/volkskrant-magazine/als-deze-moede... (https://archive.ph/O7dpL)
I stopped smoking when my girlfriend got cancer and I switched to vaping. That worked for a year and a half, then my vape fell into mud and I bought a pack of smokes because I had no quick solution and started smoking again.
I'm working on going back to the vape.
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.
Pipes?
Yeah, I love my pipes.
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.
Why is it less harm compared to cigarette? I would assume the cigarette at least has a filter which makes things a little better?
A common assumption. A filter filters out harmful stuff right?
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.
It's just because cigars (and presumably pipes?) are puffed, not inhaled. You absorb nicotine through the mucus membrane in your mouth (not as much), and otherwise enjoy the flavor. The practice with cigarettes is to inhale into your lungs. You could technically puff a cigarette I guess.
People make a big deal out additives and accelerants, but the carcinogens are 99% from smoke, burning plant matter. In that respect, pure tobacco isn't meaningfully safer. That said if you "puff", that's probably safer, though still risky (mouth cancer, and you're still going to inhale some amount of smoke).
I hate to be a shill for pharma but one of my friends went on Chantix and the results seem incredible to me.
If I recall correctly the clinical studies put it at 50% success rate or higher depending on how many weeks you continue the regiment.
From the outside looking in it looked like it was way less effort and mental strain than other forms of quitting. They basically started taking the drug and by the end they just didn’t want cigarettes anymore.
For those of you looking to quit nicotine, 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.
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.
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 remember a long time ago seeing the ads on TV with the turtle...the listed side effects were half the ad.
Yes, there are some potential side effects, some of them very serious like suicidal ideation. The friend of mine who took it discussed that possibility in depth with his psychologist.
Worth keeping in mind as a generality that drugs disclose all their side effects even when those side effects are very rare or temporary.
I had a lot of trouble quitting. Menthol hemp cigarettes did the trick, smoked nice but no nicotine
Evolution:
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 :)
This has effectively been a product for many years, 22nd Century Group sells very low nicotine tobacco smoking cessation products.
The unhealthy part of smoking is the smoke, not the nicotine.
Herbal cigarettes have been a thing forever. They are common on film and TV sets when actors need to smoke for a part but don't want the nicotine.
We used to smoke clove cigarettes. They would crackle with oil when you inhaled.
That has already been a thing that has existed.
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).
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.
Cars, trucks, powerplants, indoor air, are bad for you.
Indeed they are, and you should also minimize exposure to the fumes from cars/trucks/powerplants and try to improve indoor ventilation.
I don't generally suck on the tailpipe of my car like a cigarette or vape.
What are you fucking twelve? Just put the cigarette down.
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).
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.
I wish authorities would punish smoking in public areas more aggressively. I'm so tired of inhaling smoke or vape clouds when walking the streets or at bus/tram stops. Theoretically you are not supposed to smoke at bus stops, but it isn't enforced (EU/PL). Entering an office building means inhaling poison, unless you can hold your breath, because there is always a crowd of people smoking.
Aggressive laws and enforcement would do wonders, and also encourage potential quitters.
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.
I literally saw a meme image saying this last year. Crazy to see it become reality.
You could always cut out the middle man and have cancer surgically implanted in your lungs.
All while sparing the rest of us from inhaling your cancer cloud. Win-win for everyone!
For those of you who believe smoking is all or nothing, here's my experience.
Started smoking at age 11 (yeah Im French), gradually increasing to about a pack a day in my 20s. Reduced to about half a pack in my 30s. Did the vaping thing then, trying cold turkey a few times, without success. Then one day, I just didn't want to smoke anymore, stopped completely. (I was already smoking only half cigarettes for a while, cause I didn't like the feeling anymore). I didn't have urges to smoke at all for years, even when going out, getting drunk. Even with all my colleagues would go out for a cigarettes and I had to stay alone in a room.
Nowadays, I am in a situation where maybe once every two months I go to a party and I smoke a few cigarettes. Maybe over a weekend, I'd smoke a pack, then I don't smoke at all for another two months. If there is no party I don't smoke, if there's one, I may. I have zero urges the next days, I don't even think about it.
I think it's a question of age, maybe I don't go to that many parties anymore, maybe I don't feel the need to relax or to take a break anymore. I am 100% remote, live in the countryside, that might help compared to office work in a big city as I used to do.
I am not advising anyone to pick up smoking after years of stopping.
But I am writing this just to say that to me the usual things that people say about addiction weren't true at all:
- It wasn't difficult to stop (that last time, I'd already tried a few times before and failed). For some reason, it just happened that I didn't want to continue. I didn't have a date, I didn't have a "last cigarette then it's over" moment. I just didn't feel like smoking anymore. It also sort of happened gradually, first I didn't want to smoke entire cigarettes anymore, then I would stop smoking after half a cigarette.
- I smoked and vaped several times since, sometimes for several days in a row, sometimes at my house, I never felt I would go back to by a addicted smoker. My wife also does this, I can tell she's having a bit more of a hard time not smoking again, but she manages too, so I am not the only oddball here.
I never smoked but strangely enough, the biggest success stories with regards to smoking, came from people who just ... stopped smoking. And with that I mean completely, cold-turkey.
I understand that this is not possible for everyone, as the brain works differently and some just have a harder push towards addiction by default (but also habit). But the most successful quitters I know of in reallife, more than half a dozen actually, were those who just decided to quit it. In theory lowering down to e. g. vapes and what not may help, but I know some who then just went back to their old habits, and kept on lying to themselves about it. The brain is great at finding excuses, so people may need to try different ways to handle the brain. It is not the cigarette as such nor vape or the addiction as the main problem - it is how the brain works and operates. What is also interesting is that many people do not even realise that, how they self-trick themselves into being addicts. (I am aware that it is very hard to break out of the cycle for many people too; not saying it may be easy for everyone. Often people have additional problems once in addiction, financial ones, physical problems, depression and so forth.)
I was always taught it's the nicotine in cigarettes that makes them addictive. But it's actually the action of inhaling from a little stick and exhaling visible smoke/vapour that is most addictive. It's quite curious why that is. I have never used nicotine regularly but I did feel this craving after using a nicotine-free vape for a while.
So if you have to do it, you might as well do the least harmful one, which is not cigarettes. You should also be able to kick the nicotine very easily. It will take a couple of weeks but it's not that hard. Kicking the inhaling and exhaling part is the hard bit.
Yes, it's funny how everyone here is talking about the chemical addiction only.
That is a thing, but there's also the habits you formed over the years. And they can be worse than the chemical craving.
I've greatly reduced my smoking multiple times for days up to a week. And then I forgot one morning and went back to my usual intake. Once I even stopped smoking for 3 days but forgot the 4th and lit one.
You need a plan for the reflexes you've formed too.
> it's actually the action of inhaling from a little stick and exhaling visible smoke/vapour that is most addictive. It's quite curious why that is.
Because dragons are cool
A perfect, ouroboros of addiction
for me, its black n milds.
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.
> and you look cooler too
Did you watch too many Marlboro ads? Smokers look like bozo either way.
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. I feel much stronger euphoric feelings from working out now than I ever did from drinking.
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.
How cool is COPD and lung cancer? Vaping at least does not kill you
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.
Where do you all live that smoking or vaping are still a thing?!
It is simple. Ban them. Otherwise it is genocide.
How is this not The Onion…
It literally is The Onion, from their print paper last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1gz53b0/the_easiest_...
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.
So, journalism ethics have totally disappeared because someone complains on the internet? Grow up…
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.