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Comment by wp381640 | Hacker News Reader

> Are you sure vaping is actually reducing potential harm?

Yep. I quit smoking via 3 years of vaping and tapering down on nicotine. I've referred and seen no less than a half-dozen people I know do the same - some of the hardest smokers i've known (including my own fathers 40 year+ pack a day habit)

If anybody asks i'll always turn people onto vaping - even if they don't ask i'll push them towards it, nothing has gotten even close to working like vaping has a a quit mechanism

I really strongly believe that this is an area where regulations lag real-world experience and there are a ton of vested interests in preserving the existing regimes of either smoke tobacco or nothing at all

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Anecdotal counterpoint: I was a 1-2 pack a day smoker for ten years. If I'd picked up vaping I'd probably still be smoking. I tried early e-cigarettes and didn't care for them because while I got the nicotine the actual practice wasn't as pleasant. But if that aspect of "this is fine for me" was present I may not have asserted my desire to stop so strongly. I had a hard time quitting until I went all-in with no surrogates.

A resolute mind and a week in bed/at home was what did it. From 100% -> 0%. I've had maybe 2 cigarettes since that time and they were enough to convince me I don't want the habit back. Because of whatever recovery processes were happening with my lungs/esophagus I was all kinds of sick for that week. Staying home let me be as gross as I needed to be to get past the worst of it. And really, the first 3-4 days are the worst of the physical symptoms. Once you make it to a week it gets easier, two weeks even moreso. Years out and it's hard to believe I kept it up for so long. I'm really glad I didn't start vaping.

Congratulations on quitting! Do you feel you could explain the difference vaping made for tapering down, as opposed to trying to smoke fewer and fewer cigarettes?

As a person who smokes on and off, part of it is that you can continue your physical habit (take a break, hold something in your hand, breathe in warm air with a specific taste etc) but you can still drop the nicotine.

If you were to try and cut down on cigs you can only do it by reducing the number of smoking sessions, whereas with a vaporiser you can keep your sessions static and just reduce the addictive chemical compound.

In essence it's easier to reduce your nicotine addiction if you can continue to comfort yourself with the physical habit part of the addiction

I'm someone who used to crack up if he hadn't had a cigarette in 3 hours. Replacing cigarette with vape isn't some natural effort, but it is far from hard to do either. The nervous compulsion to have a cigarette is satisfied by a vape, after which, for reasons I simply do not understand, it becomes easier and easier to just not pick up the vape over time.

I don't know at what point it happened, but I can easily go a full day and 'forget to' vape. Smoking was never like that

It's because of the other stuff in the tobacco plant. There's a whole host of addictive things that aren't nicotine in there.

If you can switch from many addictive things to just nicotine, then you can get off the nicotine alone pretty easily. It only takes about 3 days for cravings to stop.

How long ago did you quit?

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