I have a friend who has been using an e-cigarette for 10+ years. He doesn’t seem any less addicted to smoking as back when he was using old-fashioned cigarettes.
I understand e-cigarettes are supposed to help you quit… but has anyone actually had success with them? Or, is it more like trading one vice for another?
I found this question surprising. “Do they work?” At first I didn’t understand - work at what? Then I realized that you’re thinking of them as quitting smoking devices. They’re not that. It’s an alternative to smoking. You inhale fewer particulates but often more nicotine, and there have been some health questions about the oils that serve as a medium for the nicotine and how healthy they are to inhale. It’s not thoroughly understood yet and there’s a big range of products out there.
The companies that sell them will swear up and down that they are to help you quit. And some users of them will tell you how much healthier it is and how they’re halfway to quitting. This is all, essentially, lies that they are telling themselves and you.
If you want to see a nicotine abatement product, check out nicotine gum or patches. There is nothing enjoyable about them. They allow the user to divide quitting into two stages: first, getting the habit out of their system, and second, phasing out their nicotine addiction. They do not deliver any enjoyment or rush, and are designed to be clinical and dull. The gum is hard and has a medicine flavor and plain grey color.
E-cigs on the other hand, enhance smoking. They allow you to smoke in more places. They add fruity flavors. The gadgets are cool and the different things you fill them with are stylishly presented. You still go through most of the motions of smoking and you’re getting more nicotine than before.
Why would anyone consider that a quitting tool? It absolutely is not.
Because so many of us have quit using them, as you can ween yourself off of the nicotine with lower and lower concentrations.
People HAVE used them to quit successfully though. You can keep lowering the nicotine levels on them slowly in a similar manner as the nicotine gum and patches and it tends to be cheaper.
What I see are anecdotes about people who vaped and then quit. FDA has said they find no evidence that vaping improves outcomes for people trying to quit. There are other proven therapies, too, that don’t have all the health risks.
I also see a lot of anecdotes right here from people who switched to vaping and then did not quit.
The bottom line is that vaping may or may not have played a part in this or that person’s story, but there is no firm basis to hold it up as a quitting aid. So we should stop doing that.
No offense, but as someone from outside of the US, the FDA is not the sole speaker of what is safe or what helps addiction. You guys have a LOT of commonly consumed things that are outright banned in other countries.
While vaping specifically isn’t mentioned as a cessation-aid, my country states that “nicotine is approved for use in nicotine replacement therapies, (e.g. the patch, inhaler or nicotine gum) to ease withdrawal symptoms and help people quit smoking.” Research is ongoing, of course.
I’ll listen to mine, you listen to yours.
I happen to agree with you. I don’t consider the FDA perfect, just several degrees more reliable than internet anecdotes.
and there have been some health questions about the oils that serve as a medium for the nicotine and how healthy they are to inhale.
Yeah, by fear mongering satanic panic moms and by monied interests
Nicotine vapes are orders of magnitude more safe than cigarettes. All the research shows it, and the medical establishment is full of cowards with “vapes lead to cigarettes” bullshit.
The only harmful vape chemicals (on any scale close to cigarettes) are sketchy fake weed from China. 100% of the popcorn lung cases stem from that.
There’s also sketchy fake vape juice from China. A huge amount of disposable vapes (elfbar etc) for sale are counterfeit. Who knows what they’re filled with.
Actually the popcorn lung was traced back to one dude in LA who used a thickening agent to make his THC liquid seem thiccc.
Panic moms like… the Mayo Clinic?
a Mayo Clinic study published in The New England Journal of Medicine finds that lung injuries from vaping most likely are caused by direct toxicity or tissue damage from noxious chemical fumes.
…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported more than 800 lung injury cases that are associated with electronic cigarette use, or vaping, over the past few months. Twelve deaths have been confirmed in 10 states
Yeah, and it’s all from bullshit THC additive stuff. Not from nicotine vaping. If I add rat poison to my apple juice, it doesn’t mean apple juice is harmful.
This is the shit I’m talking about, conflating harmful with not harmful.
Mayo Clinic says, in the link I posted, that a good proportion of cases they’ve handled had THC additives, but not all. And they repeat what I said earlier: that it is not well understood but there are signs of trouble. They link to another panic mom / monied interest, the American Lung Association, who say:
A study from the University of North Carolina found that the two primary ingredients found in e-cigarettes—propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin—are toxic to cells and that the more ingredients in an e-liquid, the greater the toxicity.2 E-cigarettes produce a number of dangerous chemicals including acetaldehyde, acrolein, and formaldehyde. These aldehydes can cause lung disease, as well as cardiovascular (heart) disease.3 E-cigarettes also contain acrolein, a herbicide primarily used to kill weeds. It can cause acute lung injury and COPD and may cause asthma and lung cancer.4 Both the U.S. Surgeon General and the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine have warned about the risks of inhaling secondhand e-cigarette emissions, which are created when an e-cigarette user exhales the chemical cocktail created by e-cigarettes. In 2016, the Surgeon General concluded that secondhand emissions contain, “nicotine; ultrafine particles; flavorings such as diacetyl, a chemical linked to serious lung disease; volatile organic compounds such as benzene, which is found in car exhaust; and heavy metals, such as nickel, tin, and lead.” The Food and Drug Administration has not found any e-cigarette to be safe and effective in helping smokers quit. If smokers are ready to quit smoking for good, they should call 1-800-QUIT NOW or talk with their doctor about finding the best way to quit using proven methods and FDA-approved treatments and counseling.
I quite vaping 6 months ago after 9 years. Vaping is…not good. Can it be used to stop smoking? Absolutely! Your lungs will thank you but man, everyone should be striving to quite nicotine entirely. It’s does nothing for anyone. The anxiety it cures is its own creation
i cannot spell quit
It depends whether you want to stop or not, it’s as simple as that.
E-cigarettes can be a great way to quit smoking, if that’s what you want. If you just switch to an E-cigarette and expect to magically stop smoking, you’re in for disappointment. Nicotine cessation is entirely psychological.
It’s a little bit like that Lap band surgery. You still have to want to lose weight after, otherwise you will blow it open and it will do nothing.
If anyone actually wants to quit smoking I highly suggest the book “Easy way to stop smoking” by Alan Carr.
They work just fine.
They get you off cigarettes. Problem solved.
You’ll just be vaping all the time, instead.
They were never for quitting everything. Just cigarettes.
I’d say they work if you want to quit and also actively do so. They don’t work for quitting if you just replace cigarettes with e-cigatettes. That’s like an alcoholic that’s drinking wine instead of beer and wonders why he’s still an alcoholic
If only there was some benefits from switching. Like financially or lung-capacity wise.
Maybe add a /s although I hate having to add an /s.
There are. Vapes are orders of magnitude less harmful than cigarettes.
thatsthejoke.jpg
Sorry. Poe’s Law. There’s plenty of people in this thread making that statement seriously.
Actually, vapes were created to get you smoking MORE because you can smoke them inside. They indeed get you off of smoking cigarettes, they did for me, I probably vape 1.5-2x more than I ever smoked.
Yes. Pack a day + chain smoking when I drank. I used an ecig to quit. Over the course of about 7 years, (yeah, just like your friend!) 12mg then 9mg then 6, then 3, then 1.5, then 0. I stayed on 0 for awhile and then one day I got out the car at a store and my ecig must of hit the ground. I never saw it again. That was the day I finally quit for good. Been 3 years now.
If nothing else, ecigs are way less of a risk and way less of a diminisher to ones quality of life compared to analog cigarettes. There is no stank left on the user and the users clothes. There is no more hacking up a lung every morning. ecigs seem to not suppress the immune system as harshly as analog cigarettes either. ecigs are incredibly cheaper too.
There is a lot of propaganda out there, misinformation, being disseminated by “big tobacco” - cause they are losing and have lost A LOT of profits due to people switching to ecigs and quitting analog cigarettes. They’ve even lobbied governements to pass legislation restricting access to ecig materials - citing the same old bullshit line: “Won’t somebody think of the children!?! OH THE CHILDREN!!!”
I’ve many people have trouble transitioning from cigarettes to vape only and they usually just give up. They never really make that mental push where you say to yourself “I’m not going to buy another pack of cigarettes and rely on the vape”.
The next step if you accomplish the first is to gradually reduce nicotine over time. I started at 12 and was at 6 within a few months. Then I vaped pretty heavily at 3 or 1 mg for a lot of years. Finally, after about 8 years of vaping(and not smoking one cigarette) I decided to just vape fluid without nicotine. That led me to forgetting about vaping almost all of the time.
Of course people can do it much quicker than I did but I didn’t really care much about the vaping as long as I was off of cigarettes.
He’s not smoking.
Pure nicotine is about as harmful as caffeine. Some people will want to quit it altogether, others find it useful. It’s all good.
According to my cardiologist, nicotine is the part of cigarette smoke that has a detrimental effect on the heart and arteries. Way more harmful than caffeine.
Make him give you the evidence. Here’s a systematic review of nicotine side effects and heres the RCP report on vaping.
Physicians who spread fear about vaping are killing people. They should go back to medical school and pay more attention in their epidemiology classes.
You have no idea what you’re talking about and spreading misinformation. I developed brain cancer a while back. Ask the doc if I can vape. She says sure. Year later I can barely walk from the extreme nerve damage cause by the vape. And yes there are reasons why I’m 100% sure it’s the vape. Even Australia has a national ban on them. Yes they did help me to stop smoking but at a steep price. But no lol some random guy on the internet thinks he knows more than doctors, just like the vaccine denialists on Facebook. It would be ironic if it weren’t so fuckin sad.
I’m sorry you went through that but a temporal link is not causal evidence. There are millions of people convinced MMR vaccine caused their child’s autism too, but it did not.
Australia does have an extremely wrong-headed approach to vaping. It will kill millions.
“I farted and then it started raining. I’m 100% sure my fart made it rain”.
Yea nicotine is harmless lol, it’s almost as if they didn’t get caught lying to congress about that very thing they knew was a lie. And you’re repeating the shit for them, for free. climate change is harmless too. see how fucking stupid that sounds?
What the fuck are you on about.
I’m responding to a question with my personal experience. What the fuck are you on about?
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Link your evidence and I will critique it. I can’t do anything with this hand-wavey nonsense.
There’s a lot of really terrible anti-vaping research out there (as there is in any field). Like the one that claimed vapers were more likely to have heart attacks which was withdrawn after reviewers and editors demanded they state which happened first, the vaping or the heart attack.
It is a difficult area to study, no doubt. If you’re relying on observational studies which show an association but cannot determine whether there is a causal arrow, or even which direction it points in, you need to be very careful about how you interpret it. You can’t rely on the authors or the headlines. Pub Peer is often a useful first port of call to find any concerns raised, a citation search is also useful.
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If you don’t care enough to have compiled the evidence, how can you justify expressing a strongly held opinion on a public forum? Just spew out any old bullshit headline as long as it confirms your prejudices? Regardless of how many millions of lives are on the line?
That’s not good enough. If you make a serious claim, back it up with your sources, or just don’t do it.
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Physicians who spread fear about vaping are killing people.
A major point of that article is that the
health draftsdeaths from vaping in the US are caused by substances that are banned from the UK. So maybe doctors in the UK might be spreading false info, but it sounds like doctors in the US might have a point!That’s not true at all. There was one US cannabis outlet using vitamin E acetate as a diluent in error. It’s lethal when heated and not a standard component of any e-cigarette anywhere at all.
It may not be true at all, but it’s in the source that you posted.
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E-cigarettes is designed to replace cigarettes nowadays, not to help you quit smoking.
Most of them are actually cigarettes company subsidiary, just look up some f1 sponsor and you will find them.
If you use them that way. You can also dial down the nicotine in them to zero to wean yourself off of it.
I actually just made the experience worse and worse without adjusting the nicotine. Switched to unflavored, then switched to freebase, then my vape broke and I started using my shitty old vape. It became a chore to smoke so it was easy to stop.
Although, I’ve usually been pretty good at controlling my nicotine when needed, so I would not describe myself as some highly addicted even when I was vaping a lot.
freebase
Mfer are you smoking crack?
There’s two types of nicotine used in vapes freebase and salts. When vaping first started everything was freebase. In my experience it’s a slower come up and doesn’t hit as strong. Although I prefer freebase. Nicotine salts are easy to over do.
Huh, never knew that. Always just seen nicotine as nicotine. Usually when I hear freebase when referring to a substance as smoked though, it is typically cocaine lol
Keep in mind that ALSO comes in a salt form, which is the typical powder you see.
I don’t think he is…
I just saw your response to my comment, didn’t load earlier. Yes is fundamentally the same chemical reaction. Acid/base reaction that results in a salt. Makes a huge difference in the experience in my opinion, I find the salt form to be much closer to real cigs. But as you can see from the other commenter, people have different preferences.
Cool, is there any downsides to using the salt over the freebase form?
I think the main thing is that you can get a more intense nicotine hit, probably because it is easier to smoke higher concentrations, so I assume it is more addictive in that regard. It’s a smoother smoke and you don’t get that residual nicotine in the mouth that you would at high concentrations of the freebase. You can always just try it out, most vapes are compatible with both juices, although they might be optimized for one over the other.
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That’s what I did after 5 years of vaping. Gradually went down to 0.5% nic and finally quit in May.
Congrats! Good for you! That’s so hard to do.
I understand e-cigarettes are supposed to help you quit…
That’s where your wrong, kiddo
If anything, people who switched to vaping are now even more addicted. Some of the people I knew would live an entire day without ever letting go of the vape
I managed to quit smoking by vaping about 6 years ago. For the most part a cigarette is a cigarette, but I was buying juice so I could control the level of nicotine. Started at 12, then to 6, 3 and finally 1.5 strength. Took about a year.
When I was at 1.5 I had a real bad chest cold so I put it down, never picked it back up. Vaping really helped me because I could quit without withdrawal of any kind. I worry about the prefilled convenience store pods because it doesn’t seem like you get that level of control to ween yourself off the nicotine.
My lungs felt better when I switched to e-cigs but my nicotine intake skyrocketed. For cigarettes I had to go outside and devote a couple minutes. With e-cigs I could do it inside and I could just take a quick hit or two as I was doing things. So even though I felt better I felt waaay more dependent on the nicotine, tons of hits throughout the day. I ended up switching back to cigarettes for a few weeks before I finally quit because I found it easier to stop. Still wasn’t easy though. Good luck!
They help you stop smoking. In my experience they don’t help you quit nicotine, they just manufactured all the joy out of it.
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I have a friend who has been using an e-cigarette for 10+ years. He doesn’t seem any less addicted to smoking as back when he was using old-fashioned cigarettes.
Why would he become less addicted if he keeps getting nicotine? E-cigarettes are not supposed to help you quit. That’s just how they arvertise them.
Well, they’re supposed to help you quit smoking cigarettes so you’re not inhaling all the tar and other stuff that usually lead to lung cancer. They’re not primarily designed to get rid of your nicotine addiction. So it depends on your definition.
It’s undoubtedly healthier to do neither
This is healther alternative to smoking and way easier to quit.
Quiting is relatively easy if done the right way - add less and less nicotine shot to each bottle until you start forgetting your vape. For example, go from 3mg/ml to 0mg/ml in the period of 6 months.
