Here's one way to think about it:
1.We quickly learn to like the taste of tobacco, which is initially repulsive (remember?), because the nicotine buzz reinforces a positive association. It's just a highly conditioned response.
2. Many nonsmokers find the taste of non-tobacco flavored vape neutral to pleasant on first hit (try it on non-smoking friends - none of them enjoy it enough to take up nicotine, because nicotine isn't reinforcing for them, but they don't gag on the taste. Some really immediately like the taste - that virtually never happens with tobacco.)
3.You are already conditioned to be positively reinforced by the nicotine. In fact, you're addicted to it, which is helpful here. Because:
4. Once your neural circuitry realizes that the buzz happens without the particular taste sense of burning leaves and paper and stuff that you have paired with it, it very quickly reconditions to associate the new taste sense with the buzz. In this case the tastes aren't even naturally noxious, and are in fact associated with the already-friendly positive experience of eating treats.
And in a short time you find yourself writing ecstatic prose in the ECF forum about about the delicious subtle nuances in pineapple upside-down cake flavored steam.
I do.
It's no more absurd that writing about the delicious subtle nuances in a bunch of burning rubbish, if you think about it.
Since we are really just switching antecedent stimuli, for many of us the original pairing is
totally extinguished. Not only is the taste of tobacco utterly repulsive to me now (I was a HEAVY smoker, and thought it was just YUMMY), the thought of tobacco-flavored juice is as icky to me as the thought of tobacco flavored ice cream.
Human beings are absolutely ridiculous and brilliant, we can deliberately recondition our own behavior, and I love us.
