Vapers Are Quitting by Taking Up Cigarettes
People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
Vaping was supposed to help people ease nicotine addiction, but it hasn't worked out. On TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook, e-cigarette users trade quitting tips and count days since their last hit. Now a counterintuitive idea is gaining steam: start smoking. Shaun Moore, a road-paving superintendent in Utah, turned to cigarettes last year to quit vaping. Smoking, these people say, is even more disgusting than vaping, making them less likely to light up.
All of the reasons that make you want to quit smoking — on a cold morning, for instance, having to put on shoes and a heavy coat to venture outside — none of them were there for the vape.
- S0y
Here's what I did to get rid of my nicotine addiction (vaping):
- Gradually lower the strength of my liquid until it was at the minimum.
- Stop all vaping and switch to nicotine gum
- Gradually increase the time between each gum
- Stop the gum altogether
This process took probably 3 months and tbh it was pretty miserable the whole time. It's 100% worth it tho, You don't realize how much it controls your life until you stop. You will also still get random cravings for a year or two afterwards, Heck it's been 4 years and I still sometimes get dreams where I'm vaping.
- dasKrokodil
A while back I saw this on reddit... in case you don't want to click the link, it's a picture of a cigarette with the caption "This plant-based alternative promises to help high schoolers stop vaping".
I would have never thought that people would be stupid enough to try this for real, but here we are...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
- sph
For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches and they’ve been great, cheap, and legal in the country I live in now.
Recently I got the urge to try vaping again, bought all the paraphernalia and started vaping like a chimney 24/7. Got light nicotine poisoning as well. After two days, I caught myself compulsively reaching for the vape.
So I threw everything away and I’m back to patches. Took me a week to forget the compulsive hand-to-mouth urge. I now believe intradermal nicotine is the superior method of administration. At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
- tehnoslow
"Nicotine is just caffeine" is too clean given the tumor-promotion evidence. To a large extent, it comes down to the method of delivery: patches are difficult to get hooked on because they do not cause a rapid spike in nicotine levels and are not associated with any ritual; cigarettes are hard to give up due to that spike, the accompanying ritual, and the MAO inhibitors found in the smoke; while vapes occupy a middle ground—which is precisely why they help some people quit smoking but foster addiction in others.
- mullingitover
Did a cigarette write this article?
Cigarettes are ridiculously more addictive. I know this from experience, but also from a study that found that MAOIs (in cigarettes, but not found in vapes) "dramatically increase the motivation to self-administer nicotine in rats."[1]
I had a wickedly difficult time quitting cigarettes, many failed attempts over the course of years. Vaping made quitting tobacco comically easy, and quitting vaping was also comically easy compared to cold turkey. To quit my all-day vaping habit I just...got rid of the vapes and stopped doing it. I thought about it a few times a day for the first few days, and that was it.
People saying to avoid vapes as a cessation tool are committing actual harm, imo. It's like the difference in difficulty between just jumping off a roof versus using a ladder to descend. Yes, ladders are risky, but not as risky as jumping off a roof.
- raver1975
The only way I could quit my nicotine addiction was to slowly reduce the amount of nicotine in my vape juice. Even at 0% nicotine and no more physical dependence it still took a whole year to finally stop vaping. If I had a single cigarette I would have to start the whole process over again. Nicotine addiction is a terrible enslavement.
- GarnetFloride
Had a cousin that was trying to use vape to get off of cigarettes, but it wasn't going well. The new plan was to move to the South grow tobacco.
- Zaraif13
Literally the worst idea. I quit vaping a while ago. Vaping made me, it gave me dopamine hits even when I got nothing done. Quitting has made me noticeably more focused, alert and let's me push myself harder. That feels great to me.