I was surprised when I was quitting smoking that my friend (who also smoked) was advocating vaping instead. I asked: Why not just quit completely?
I do think vaping is less dangerous than actually smoking but not doing either one is best for your health. Even getting “hooked” on nicotine gum or similar is better than smoking or vaping. But again, best to just quit nicotine / smoking / vaping completely.
Quitting cold turkey and failing sometimes prevents people from trying again.
I think people need to PRACTICE quitting and I wish more people had this mentality. Assuming that you’ll succeed at something so difficult the first of many times of trying to do it is unrealistic. It took me several attempts and taking a class about it to quit smoking.
“I couldn’t climb the mountain the first time I tried with no practice or help, therefore I’m never trying again” is very defeatist. Quitting is a process and practicing quitting is completely acceptable. Learn what didn’t work that time and develop strategies to deal with what didn’t work.
I have a bunch of tips from the class I took that I still mostly remember. I wonder how much of that info is online.
That’s a really good point. No one would expect someone’s first painting to turn out to be worth millions.
I feel like the generally accepted wisdom on the issue is that quitting smoking is hard. Whichever one works for you is the best one.
For me, “harm reduction” was just a convenient excuse for not really trying… And, I eventually decided, again, this is my experience, not advice, but, like, eventually, every method of quitting will eventually be cold turkey, so I just went for it.
Personally I found the nicotine addiction is overstated. I never had any trouble making it through 8 hours of sleep without a cigarette, so my claim that I needed one every hour or two kinda seemed like bullshit. Also, if I was so hung up on nicotine addiction - nicotine starts declining in your system almost immediately, so, if I was smoking for 5 minutes of every hour, I was spending 55 minutes of every hour in nicotine withdrawal. That’s… dumb. That’s a dumb way to live.
(I was also a heroin addict from when I was a teenager until my late 20s - and - at least heroin lasts a while. Nicotine is a garbage drug.)
In the end, smoking is a habit - and there’s not much in the way of shortcuts to changing your habits - and it’s especially hard when your enjoy it. There are better techniques and worse techniques, but no cure.
For me, when me and my wife added tiny little people to the world, I realized that they would prefer me to be alive, and I didn’t want to make them sad, so I quit.
Quitting heroin changes what you think of as hard but even my mom never quit cigarettes even after quitting heroin.
nicotine gum is probably as bad or nearly as bad as vaping since nicotine is the aspect of it that is proven to be especially bad for you.
That’s not quite true. Nicotine is indeed the addictive part of smoking, and the source of long term behavioural issues.
But that’s not, by far, the most dangerous or impactful aspect of cigarettes or vapes. Cigarettes are little cancer sticks with some of the most absurdly carcinogenic substances known, and it really destroys your lungs ability to expel excess mucus and contaminants.
Vapes don’t have nearly the same amount of quite absurdly random crap a cigarette will have, but they’re still carcinogenic and they slowly burn cilia and cause inflammatory responses.
Being addicted to nicotine gum could give you headaches, issues with mood, and eventually cardiovascular issues. It’s certainly not a good thing - but saying “nicotine is the aspect of it that is proven to be especially bad for you” is simply wrong.
but they’re still carcinogenic
…Because of the nicotine. Nicotine is a known carcinogen on its own. Propylene glycol and Glycerol are not. Of course it is possible to make vape juice with other additives that happen to be carcinogenic but those can be omitted. There have been studies showing it’s possible for vaping to irritate the airways but from what I was reading I didn’t see any hard links between that and serious health outcomes, or that this always necessarily happens.
So as best I can tell, my statement is correct, the main thing about vaping that is bad for you is the nicotine, and I wasn’t able to find evidence that other (necessary) aspects of it are inherently harmful in a serious way. If you could provide evidence of that I’d consider it.
alternate take: personal freedom of movement, whether bidedal, or automated, is a thing of value, as is electricity, clean running water, and a majority of what modern technology provides. it, like most everything else can be done better, and cleaner. not the same argument as smoking, which was always an “entertainment”, as apposed to transportation and perambulation which are a necessity. thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Yeah, I can imagine that. Tobacco companies have been selling better smoking (first, electric cigarettes, then vapes) for decades.
Without control, companies will always want to sell more
Vaping is actually very helpful and it’s probably helped a lot of people stop smoking.
The only problem was the fact that they got away with doing shit like advertising it to kids and making it cool. Fix that problem and vaping is almost literally only an advantage compared to cigarettes.
And even with more people taking it up, it’s still unhealthy but it’s like mildly unhealthy instead of cigarettes where it’s like oh yeah you’re going to double your chance of dying at 50.
Vaping is actually very helpful and it’s probably helped a lot of people stop smoking.
Being marginally less unhelpful than some other very unhelpful thing is still objectively unhelpful.
Marginally is a massive understatement. Maybe in 50 years we’re going to discover that it causes some crazy side effects, but in comparison to smoking it’s like having a hamburger once a week compared to three a day.
The point is, its amount of helpfulness is still negative, not positive.
For someone who is a smoker and otherwise would not be able to quit its helpfulness as immensely positive.
For every smoker vaping helps, it also tempts probably at least one person to start using who didn’t before. Therefore, it is 1000% indisputably negative and everybody trying to make excuses for it is a goddamn enabler.
