This is pretty much why I wrote up the whole story instead of just "Hi, I'm new, wanna post my newbie quota, bye!" - it really was so easy it was almost literally an accident to quit analogs by vaping. All I had to do was be willing to go along with it, and keep my pigheaded rebelliousness from interfering. I never had to even decide to quit, let alone try; I just allowed myself to choose the more attractive option of vaping every time the urge to light up came over me until the urge to light up a cigarette, specifically, went away and the urge to vape replaced it. That took maybe three days, maximum. I smoke(d) American Spirits, so I didn't have any MAOI additives or theobromine addictions to deal with, just nicotine and habits; it might not be that quick and easy for everyone. But half as easy as I had it would still be easier than anything else I'd tried.
In the research I did I kept coming across the FDA's FUD and the awful game of telephone the media played with it, and every time I came to this forum I saw the banners about NY state legislation and the surveys. I took the surveys, and today I signed the petition, because honestly I'm a little scared.
I'm not a nonsmoker yet. I'm not really an ex-smoker yet. I'm just a smoker who's been distracted by a shinier habit. If that new habit gets banned, I'm right back to killing myself. I have no illusions about that. I'm still addicted to nicotine; I use it to self-medicate for ADHD, arthritis, chronic fatigue, and depression.
There are a bunch of arguments against smoking that make plenty of sense, but over the last couple of decades they seem to have degraded into a bunch of semihysterical snippets of dogma: smoke is bad for everyone; smokers are bad people for exposing themselves and those around them; nicotine is bad for addicting smokers to smoke so they won't just quit like we think it's so patently obvious they should; and therefore anything short of total intolerance for nicotine addiction and nicotine addicts is a disservice to humanity, while any amount of taxation, alienation, or demonization smokers experience is their just reward for the sin of smoking.
If the sensible arguments against smoking - the cost in human lives and quality of life - were the real issue, the agencies and purportedly-compassionate activists would be setting up five subsidized e-cigarette stands for every methodone clinic, trying to help smokers separate their relatively harmless nicotine addiction and physical/social/psychological habits from the genuinely harmful delivery method of smoking tobacco.
Instead, we hear that vaping isn't appropriate as a smoking-cessation aid or harm-reduction device because it doesn't require giving up nicotine (never mind all the people now just as chronically addicted to gum or patches instead) - as if my
nicotine intake, not its delivery method, were making other people sick!
We hear that e-cigs could be a gateway to smoking tobacco, when the overwhelming majority of anecdotal evidence points the other way - it's not a gateway in, it's a doorway out.
We hear that tasty flavors are intended to appeal to children, presumably to addict them to nicotine and turn them into smokers - when not only do adults also enjoy fruit or beverage or dessert flavors, that may in some cases be what makes vaping more appealing and helps them quit smoking!
We do
not hear the anti-smokers and FDA saying, "We know it's as tough to give up nicotine as it is to give up ....... We feel compassion for those addicted to nicotine, who until now have only had carcinogenic delivery methods available. We are excited to explore this alternative that may allow them to wean from their addiction or not, as they choose, with minimum harm to themselves and others either way." Yet it seems like that's what we
would hear - from anyone who truly had our (and our families') best interests at heart, as these organizations claim to.
Instead, it seems that the idea of a device that makes nicotine addiction anything short of life-threatening and nicotine indulgence anything less than demonstrably despicable, allowing nicotine addicts to exercise a personal choice to remain addicted without causing harm or deserving vilification, somehow makes these organizations feel so threatened that they completely overlook how easy e-cigs make it for even firmly-entrenched smokers to do just what they've been asking us to do - quit
smoking. Quit deliberately generating, inhaling, and exhaling smoke. It's as though they find the potential loss of justification for their zero-tolerance zealotry more threatening than the cost of the very human lives they purport to be defending!
Sorry, bit of a rant there. Ahem.
Anyway... yeah, I wrote it up the way I did to emphasize certain points. I did not intend to quit (although I have always hoped to). I didn't even have to decide to quit (although we all know a firm decision and a firm quit date are the first step). The tasty, tasty flavors were a major factor in how easy it was (especially the candy ones). I didn't even realize I had quit at first. I didn't threatened or depressed by the imminent prospect of giving up cigarettes, so the panic/rebellion trigger was never activated - the thing that's thrown off all my quit attempts to date.
I did leave out certain other, possibly pertinent details: I have tried to quit before; I have tried to quit with my doctor's assistance; I have taken Zyban and used nicotine patches and gone cold turkey and tapered to one cigarette a day until my nicotine addiction was completely gone, and still come back every time for psychological reasons, not nicotine addiction. Even if I taper to zero nicotine (if I can give up self-medicating as noted above), I'll probably vape for life to satisfy the physical and psychological habits that kept bringing me back to smoking before. But all that stuff is in the statistics already, and statistics over a large representative sample speak far louder than my anecdote could on those points.
What the statistics don't show is the dizzying
ease of it. I tripped over a four-inch-long tube of chocolate vapor and fell across the finish line. Now I want anyone who's where my friend and I were a week ago to know it can happen that way.
I also want anyone who wants to ban vaping to know that smokers are lying tied to the railroad tracks, there's a train coming, and this proposed ban will kick away the knife we're trying to cut the ropes with - just because you think, from your safe distance, that it would be better if we'd make the extra effort to untie the knots instead.
So, um... yeah. Glad to get that across.
