Hello everyone!
Let me start off with a little information about myself. My name is Tom, I'm 20 years old, I live in New York, and, with the exception of the past seven days, I've been a smoker for roughly five and a half years, ever since I was a freshman in high school. For the vast majority of that time, it's been a pack a day of whatever I found myself fancying at the time. In the beginning, I was cutting my teeth on the classic Marlboro Reds, but have spent my fair share of time with everything from Newport 100's, to Pall Malls, to Turkish Royals, and even a nine month stint with pouches of Bali Shag that would last me between two and three days. The Reds got old, the shag got expensive, the Royals got stale, the Pall Malls got... well, you know. And the Newports even showed me the colorful (too colorful) hue of the inside of my lungs on one occasion. After all the money that literally went up in smoke, the countless mornings spent trying to dislodge a foreign element from a set of far-too-young lungs, and the constant paranoia that came from having to hide it from my mother for four years (relatively easy when your dad worked for Marlboro), there was still nothing that could truly motivate me to quit. And considering that I've entirely grown up and existed in an age where the fact that I was killing myself was being shoved down my throat, I consider my dedication nothing short of Herculean.
This is not to say that there have not been many occasions on which I've tried to free myself from this oh-so-enticing demon. I've given almost everything a go at one point or another. There were many a time when, after finding myself astoundingly out of breathe after an astoundingly pathetic amount of physical activity, I'd make a vow to myself that I was done. And, not surprisingly, I'd be incredibly lucky if I made it a full two days before I found myself once again standing in line at the gas station counter, ten dollar bill in hand, silently wishing death upon every customer standing between me and my fix. A few minutes and several frantic puffs later, and I was my regular old enjoyable self again, without the cold sweats, muscle tension, and uncontrollable rage directed at everything everyone anywhere has ever done. And cold turkey was not, by a long shot, my only attempted method. The gum essentially kicked me in the stomach from the inside, the lozenges tasted bad enough to make me crave a cigarette solely for the palate-cleansing, and the patch gave me a dream in which I killed the entire cast of Scooby-Doo in a head-on collision and subsequently buried their mutilated corpses in a shallow mass grave off the side of the highway. I wish I could say that last one was a joke. I truly do.
Now despite all these shortcomings of both my personal willpower and these, in my opinion, utterly useless nicotine replacement therapies, the one, overarching factor in my failure to kick the habit was one simple, yet immensely powerful thing; I love smoking. I love the way it feels, I love the clouds, I love always having something to do-- wait, no, TWENTY things to do, in my pocket, all day everyday. I love the motion. I love the social aspect. All of my friends are smokers (smokers, mind you, not just people who occasionally smoke), except for two, one of which being my girlfriend of a year and eight months. In fact, that may have been the hardest part of all in my various attempts to quit. Not only was I putting myself through some very persistent physical and mental discomfort, but on top of it all, I would typically find myself alone in the room every 45 minutes as all of my companions funneled out the door to create one big, happy cloud of smog that I wanted nothing more than to contribute to. And so, it would seem, I was simply doomed to failure.
Fast forward to roughly three weeks ago. I had entirely given up on the idea of giving it up. My last go at it was over a year ago by that point, and after the countless failures, it seemed stupid for me to put myself through another ill-fated, distressing attempt to permanently stop taking part in my favorite hobby. Whatever. My seventies can go screw themselves, right? Carpe diem. At this particular moment in time, I was sitting with three of my friends, discussing cigarettes and their increasingly absurd prices ($10.35 for a pack of Marbs in that part of NY). While smoking. Fitting, no? The conversation made a turn towards e-cigarettes. Three of us, on separate occasions, had taken drags off of cheap, disposable gas station varieties, discussing how just generally unsatisfying they were, despite their novelty. One of them, however, made a remark about how, apparently, you can actually purchase quality ones online that put out an amount of "smoke" comparable to a real cigarette. "I saw a video of this one on YouTube," he says. "It looked pretty good. It was called a Greensmoke or something." The conversation continued on as usual to discuss a multitude of other things, like cars and duck tape and lesbians and serial killers. You know, the norm. It wasn't until I saw my bank account balance about two days later that his earlier comment came back to my mind. Seeing as how my summer job was over and I was heading to school shortly thereafter, the math looked something like this:
$XXX - ($10.35 x Y Days) = NOT LONG TIL SCREWED
This, of course, sent me into a brief panic. Nothing smoking a cigarette couldn't fix of course. With that out of the way, I started plotting my options, and, since quitting was out of the picture, I immediately went online and searched for this mythical Greensmoke.com or whatever it was. And I was astounded by what I saw. What's this? It looks exactly like a cigarette? And I can smoke anywhere? I won't smell like a rotting tire fire!? And EACH cartridge is one WHOLE PACK of cigarettes, and I can get FIVE for JUST SEVENTEEN DOLLARS!?!?!? AND THE STARTER KIT!!! IT'S ONLY $130 FOR TWO OF THEM WITH 10 PACKS!?!?!?!?!?!? SIGN ME UP, RIGHT NOW. I Googled "Greensmoke review" and found literally DOZENS of people saying they were the greatest thing ever! And they even had coupon codes and direct links to the site to buy it! It was SO simple! So at that point, I immediately pulled out my bank card and bought it!
Just kidding. I found this place first. A quick search and some reading revealed that not only was this particular e-cigarette model a complete and utter ripoff, but that it was such a ripoff that the people peddling them should all be stripped naked and dragged over a salt-covered cactus field infested with fire ants and land-dwelling, herpes-infected puffer fish. Seeing the immensity of this forum and its active userbase, I decided that the open internet would be a very dangerous, very expensive place to venture through with the limited (read: zero) knowledge I had. And so, I became a lurker. A very hardcore lurker, at that, reading every relevant thread I could find on how to choose one's first electronic cigarette. Gradually, over the course of several days with many hours of reading and research behind me, I decided that more important to me than the look of this product in which I'd be investing, was the feel. What's the point in trying to emulate form over function? I might as well have just rolled up cardboard tubes, colored them to look like stoges, and lit the ends on fire. I finally felt informed enough to make my purchasing decision, and, after another several days of research, purchased a 1000mah eGo-T starter kit from MyFreedomSmokes.com for $60, along with a sampler pack of six different flavors for another $50 (120mL in all), and some extra cartridges and little odds and ends. Grand total: $120, free shipping... Screw you, Greensmoke. I worked hard for my money.
I had it shipped to my school, and picked it up last Tuesday at noon. Absolutely fiending for my nicotine, having not purchased a pack for the morning, I opened it up, prepared it as I was so kindly educated to do by the various members of this forum, and immediately took a massive (albeit long and slow) drag directly into my lungs. BOOM. HOLY COW. IT HURTS. A LOT. THIS THING SUCKS. But, desperate as I was, I took a gulp of water and another drag. A more cautious one, of course. It wasn't long before I was puffing it nonstop, enjoying the deliciousness of this fantastic flavor known as RY4. And so passed the rest of this week. The eGo-T has not left my pocket since I received it. Except for it to be used, of course. It was love at second-puff. My friends here all smoke, of course, just like the ones back home (smoker magnetism??), but it was no big deal for me to step outside with them, puffing the entire way down and out, stand with them as they smoked, continuing to puff, and then accompany them back in. Still puffing. Many people have tried this thing, and almost just as many have found it quite enjoyable. I even get envious looks when I get to sit on a couch, vaping to my heart's content, and blowing out thick rings of "smoke" directly towards the smoke detectors. There is nothing quite like it, I must say. And, twelve hours after receiving it, I tried a regular cigarette. Even at that point, I did not find it nearly as enjoyable as the cool little piece of tech I held in my pocket. I haven't smoked a single one since then, and know that I will never go back to smoking. Finally, finally I have found my one effective, enjoyable way to get that nicotine fix that's been driving me for the past five and a half years of my life (not as long as many of you, of course, but a sizeable percentage of the memories that I am able to recall). And to think, I went an entire week without smoking a cigarette, and didn't experience a tenth of the withdrawal symptoms that I would have been experiencing after two days without the vaporizer. Wow.
But today, I had an interesting thought. I began recalling all the little facts and numbers that I'd read lurking on this forum, and came to an interesting, and to me, mindblowing conclusion.
So an average cigarette contains 10mg of nicotine. 10%, or 1mg, is absorbed into the body. 1mg x 20 cigarettes = 20mg of nicotine per day, into my bloodstream. Vaping 2ml of 18mg liquid per day, that's 36mg of nicotine in the liquid I'm vaping. A 10% absorption rate gives me 3.6mg of nicotine. Wait. But, that's only three and a half cigarettes. I'd be going insane if that's all I had for an entire day. Absolutely nuts. But then I remembered the Health New Zealand study. Dr. Laugesen estimated the effectiveness of e-cig nicotine delivery to be roughly 10% of that of cigarette smoke. Another 10%. That's 1/100th of the nicotine from the liquid making it into my bloodstream. Assuming that number to be correct, for the past week, I've been smoking the nicotine equivalent of 0.36 cigarettes per day. A third of a stoge, and without any of the other addictive chemicals to boot. How? If this is true, how, after trying and discarding so many different nicotine replacement therapies that were delivering actually respectable amounts of the substance to me, was I able to make a literally seamless transition from addiction, without so much as thinking about it, or even wanting it to happen at all, for that matter? After all these years, did it really, honestly, all come down to me needing an electronic, cloud-producing pacifier?
This device is nothing short of a miracle to me. And in light of that revelation, and in the hope that I will someday be able to contribute even one post that might lead someone else to the same sense of freedom that I've found, I've decided to quit lurking, and join you. In every thread of this community that I've happened through thus far, I've seen little else but love and genuine support for each other in the common goal of saving health, lives, and money, a most prized rarity on the internet in this day and age. Thank you to the hundreds here who have provided me with the information that may, decades from now, end up having saved my life. Thank you to MyFreedomSmokes.com for allowing me to make this leap with the reassuring thought of, "I only need to get twelve days out of it to break even." And thank you to anyone who has actually been interested enough to read this monster of a post. I didn't intend for it to turn into this, but once I started typing it, I felt that it all had to be said, regardless of whether or not anyone would wind up reading it.
Happy vaping everyone,
Ducky
Let me start off with a little information about myself. My name is Tom, I'm 20 years old, I live in New York, and, with the exception of the past seven days, I've been a smoker for roughly five and a half years, ever since I was a freshman in high school. For the vast majority of that time, it's been a pack a day of whatever I found myself fancying at the time. In the beginning, I was cutting my teeth on the classic Marlboro Reds, but have spent my fair share of time with everything from Newport 100's, to Pall Malls, to Turkish Royals, and even a nine month stint with pouches of Bali Shag that would last me between two and three days. The Reds got old, the shag got expensive, the Royals got stale, the Pall Malls got... well, you know. And the Newports even showed me the colorful (too colorful) hue of the inside of my lungs on one occasion. After all the money that literally went up in smoke, the countless mornings spent trying to dislodge a foreign element from a set of far-too-young lungs, and the constant paranoia that came from having to hide it from my mother for four years (relatively easy when your dad worked for Marlboro), there was still nothing that could truly motivate me to quit. And considering that I've entirely grown up and existed in an age where the fact that I was killing myself was being shoved down my throat, I consider my dedication nothing short of Herculean.
This is not to say that there have not been many occasions on which I've tried to free myself from this oh-so-enticing demon. I've given almost everything a go at one point or another. There were many a time when, after finding myself astoundingly out of breathe after an astoundingly pathetic amount of physical activity, I'd make a vow to myself that I was done. And, not surprisingly, I'd be incredibly lucky if I made it a full two days before I found myself once again standing in line at the gas station counter, ten dollar bill in hand, silently wishing death upon every customer standing between me and my fix. A few minutes and several frantic puffs later, and I was my regular old enjoyable self again, without the cold sweats, muscle tension, and uncontrollable rage directed at everything everyone anywhere has ever done. And cold turkey was not, by a long shot, my only attempted method. The gum essentially kicked me in the stomach from the inside, the lozenges tasted bad enough to make me crave a cigarette solely for the palate-cleansing, and the patch gave me a dream in which I killed the entire cast of Scooby-Doo in a head-on collision and subsequently buried their mutilated corpses in a shallow mass grave off the side of the highway. I wish I could say that last one was a joke. I truly do.
Now despite all these shortcomings of both my personal willpower and these, in my opinion, utterly useless nicotine replacement therapies, the one, overarching factor in my failure to kick the habit was one simple, yet immensely powerful thing; I love smoking. I love the way it feels, I love the clouds, I love always having something to do-- wait, no, TWENTY things to do, in my pocket, all day everyday. I love the motion. I love the social aspect. All of my friends are smokers (smokers, mind you, not just people who occasionally smoke), except for two, one of which being my girlfriend of a year and eight months. In fact, that may have been the hardest part of all in my various attempts to quit. Not only was I putting myself through some very persistent physical and mental discomfort, but on top of it all, I would typically find myself alone in the room every 45 minutes as all of my companions funneled out the door to create one big, happy cloud of smog that I wanted nothing more than to contribute to. And so, it would seem, I was simply doomed to failure.
Fast forward to roughly three weeks ago. I had entirely given up on the idea of giving it up. My last go at it was over a year ago by that point, and after the countless failures, it seemed stupid for me to put myself through another ill-fated, distressing attempt to permanently stop taking part in my favorite hobby. Whatever. My seventies can go screw themselves, right? Carpe diem. At this particular moment in time, I was sitting with three of my friends, discussing cigarettes and their increasingly absurd prices ($10.35 for a pack of Marbs in that part of NY). While smoking. Fitting, no? The conversation made a turn towards e-cigarettes. Three of us, on separate occasions, had taken drags off of cheap, disposable gas station varieties, discussing how just generally unsatisfying they were, despite their novelty. One of them, however, made a remark about how, apparently, you can actually purchase quality ones online that put out an amount of "smoke" comparable to a real cigarette. "I saw a video of this one on YouTube," he says. "It looked pretty good. It was called a Greensmoke or something." The conversation continued on as usual to discuss a multitude of other things, like cars and duck tape and lesbians and serial killers. You know, the norm. It wasn't until I saw my bank account balance about two days later that his earlier comment came back to my mind. Seeing as how my summer job was over and I was heading to school shortly thereafter, the math looked something like this:
$XXX - ($10.35 x Y Days) = NOT LONG TIL SCREWED
This, of course, sent me into a brief panic. Nothing smoking a cigarette couldn't fix of course. With that out of the way, I started plotting my options, and, since quitting was out of the picture, I immediately went online and searched for this mythical Greensmoke.com or whatever it was. And I was astounded by what I saw. What's this? It looks exactly like a cigarette? And I can smoke anywhere? I won't smell like a rotting tire fire!? And EACH cartridge is one WHOLE PACK of cigarettes, and I can get FIVE for JUST SEVENTEEN DOLLARS!?!?!? AND THE STARTER KIT!!! IT'S ONLY $130 FOR TWO OF THEM WITH 10 PACKS!?!?!?!?!?!? SIGN ME UP, RIGHT NOW. I Googled "Greensmoke review" and found literally DOZENS of people saying they were the greatest thing ever! And they even had coupon codes and direct links to the site to buy it! It was SO simple! So at that point, I immediately pulled out my bank card and bought it!
Just kidding. I found this place first. A quick search and some reading revealed that not only was this particular e-cigarette model a complete and utter ripoff, but that it was such a ripoff that the people peddling them should all be stripped naked and dragged over a salt-covered cactus field infested with fire ants and land-dwelling, herpes-infected puffer fish. Seeing the immensity of this forum and its active userbase, I decided that the open internet would be a very dangerous, very expensive place to venture through with the limited (read: zero) knowledge I had. And so, I became a lurker. A very hardcore lurker, at that, reading every relevant thread I could find on how to choose one's first electronic cigarette. Gradually, over the course of several days with many hours of reading and research behind me, I decided that more important to me than the look of this product in which I'd be investing, was the feel. What's the point in trying to emulate form over function? I might as well have just rolled up cardboard tubes, colored them to look like stoges, and lit the ends on fire. I finally felt informed enough to make my purchasing decision, and, after another several days of research, purchased a 1000mah eGo-T starter kit from MyFreedomSmokes.com for $60, along with a sampler pack of six different flavors for another $50 (120mL in all), and some extra cartridges and little odds and ends. Grand total: $120, free shipping... Screw you, Greensmoke. I worked hard for my money.
I had it shipped to my school, and picked it up last Tuesday at noon. Absolutely fiending for my nicotine, having not purchased a pack for the morning, I opened it up, prepared it as I was so kindly educated to do by the various members of this forum, and immediately took a massive (albeit long and slow) drag directly into my lungs. BOOM. HOLY COW. IT HURTS. A LOT. THIS THING SUCKS. But, desperate as I was, I took a gulp of water and another drag. A more cautious one, of course. It wasn't long before I was puffing it nonstop, enjoying the deliciousness of this fantastic flavor known as RY4. And so passed the rest of this week. The eGo-T has not left my pocket since I received it. Except for it to be used, of course. It was love at second-puff. My friends here all smoke, of course, just like the ones back home (smoker magnetism??), but it was no big deal for me to step outside with them, puffing the entire way down and out, stand with them as they smoked, continuing to puff, and then accompany them back in. Still puffing. Many people have tried this thing, and almost just as many have found it quite enjoyable. I even get envious looks when I get to sit on a couch, vaping to my heart's content, and blowing out thick rings of "smoke" directly towards the smoke detectors. There is nothing quite like it, I must say. And, twelve hours after receiving it, I tried a regular cigarette. Even at that point, I did not find it nearly as enjoyable as the cool little piece of tech I held in my pocket. I haven't smoked a single one since then, and know that I will never go back to smoking. Finally, finally I have found my one effective, enjoyable way to get that nicotine fix that's been driving me for the past five and a half years of my life (not as long as many of you, of course, but a sizeable percentage of the memories that I am able to recall). And to think, I went an entire week without smoking a cigarette, and didn't experience a tenth of the withdrawal symptoms that I would have been experiencing after two days without the vaporizer. Wow.
But today, I had an interesting thought. I began recalling all the little facts and numbers that I'd read lurking on this forum, and came to an interesting, and to me, mindblowing conclusion.
So an average cigarette contains 10mg of nicotine. 10%, or 1mg, is absorbed into the body. 1mg x 20 cigarettes = 20mg of nicotine per day, into my bloodstream. Vaping 2ml of 18mg liquid per day, that's 36mg of nicotine in the liquid I'm vaping. A 10% absorption rate gives me 3.6mg of nicotine. Wait. But, that's only three and a half cigarettes. I'd be going insane if that's all I had for an entire day. Absolutely nuts. But then I remembered the Health New Zealand study. Dr. Laugesen estimated the effectiveness of e-cig nicotine delivery to be roughly 10% of that of cigarette smoke. Another 10%. That's 1/100th of the nicotine from the liquid making it into my bloodstream. Assuming that number to be correct, for the past week, I've been smoking the nicotine equivalent of 0.36 cigarettes per day. A third of a stoge, and without any of the other addictive chemicals to boot. How? If this is true, how, after trying and discarding so many different nicotine replacement therapies that were delivering actually respectable amounts of the substance to me, was I able to make a literally seamless transition from addiction, without so much as thinking about it, or even wanting it to happen at all, for that matter? After all these years, did it really, honestly, all come down to me needing an electronic, cloud-producing pacifier?
This device is nothing short of a miracle to me. And in light of that revelation, and in the hope that I will someday be able to contribute even one post that might lead someone else to the same sense of freedom that I've found, I've decided to quit lurking, and join you. In every thread of this community that I've happened through thus far, I've seen little else but love and genuine support for each other in the common goal of saving health, lives, and money, a most prized rarity on the internet in this day and age. Thank you to the hundreds here who have provided me with the information that may, decades from now, end up having saved my life. Thank you to MyFreedomSmokes.com for allowing me to make this leap with the reassuring thought of, "I only need to get twelve days out of it to break even." And thank you to anyone who has actually been interested enough to read this monster of a post. I didn't intend for it to turn into this, but once I started typing it, I felt that it all had to be said, regardless of whether or not anyone would wind up reading it.
Happy vaping everyone,
Ducky
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