People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
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People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
prohobo · · focus · HN ↗
With vaping that limit is completely gone. A vaping addiction can keep escalating until you want a puff every 30 seconds, especially once you start breaking down mental barriers like "no vaping indoors" or "no vaping while on the computer", etc.
So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.
mtlmtlmtlmtl · · focus · HN ↗
Also, I'm dubious about your claim that most people need breaks, or at least any more than vapers do. I was a smoker for over a decade. I don't remember ever feeling like "that's enough, my throat hurts". It's just that smoking was triggered by the onset of withdrawal, which begins after about an hour, and becomes urgent after maybe 2-3 hours. So I'd typically smoke at an interval of 1-3 hours depending on how convenient it was to do so. And cigarettes are expensive, so that factors into it too.
Sometimes though, especially when drinking, I could chain smoke for a couple hours straight while hanging out in a park with friends, especially in the summer.
After I switched to vaping though, I have at times ended up puffing so enthusiastically that I've made myself nauseous from the nicotine. So there's certainly a limit there too.
Edit: another interesting thing I've noticed. Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping. It takes several hours longer to become noticeable, and also feels less intense. When smoking, it took me 1 hour to start craving a cigarette, by 3 hours I'm becoming irritable with strong craving, and by 5 hours I'm extremely irritable, light-headed, and the only thing on my mind is smoking, completely incapable of focusing on anything except how to get some cigarettes and how to get to somewhere I can smoke em.
For vaping, it takes me maybe 7-8 hours to get to the 3 hour mark for smoking. I certainly get cravings long before that, maybe starting at 2-3 hours, but I'm able to push it out of my mind much more easily, for much longer. I don't know why this is. My theory is something to do with the lack of MAO inhibitors. It's also possible that it's a pharmacokinetic phenomenon, but that seems counterintuitive. If I'm ingesting higher doses of nicotine compared to smoking, blood levels will take longer to go to zero. But then I should also have higher tolerance, and therefore a higher threshold for the onset of withdrawal, since tolerance and chemical dependence are more or less the same thing.
saberience · · focus · HN ↗
Vaping is equivalent to shooting heroin or doing crack, it's so much more intense and addictive than smoking. I found quitting smoking to be incredibly easy compared to quitting vaping.
Semaphor · · focus · HN ↗
That’s a feature of the juice the mainstream products come with, not of vaping in general.
andoando · · focus · HN ↗
If I smoke a cigarette now Ill usually regret it cause Ill be thinking about the terrible taste in my mouth the next 20 mins.
Vaping? Its like eating fucking candy with a million different flavors to try when youre bored of one
SmirkingRevenge · · focus · HN ↗
I noticed this too. I was a chain smoker. I became a chain vaper, managing to quit tobacco in the process.
Eventually, I was able to cold turkey vaping in a way I could never manage with tobacco.
It took being sick for about 2 weeks so I couldn't vape. Once I was better, I just didn't do it again, and it was... actually kind of easy.
Similar situations have happened to me over the years when I was on tobacco, but I could never just walk away like I did with vaping.
Maybe part of it was that, with tobacco, you really organize a lot of your day around it. Going to the store, going outside for breaks, driving a little extra so you can fit in a smoke in the car, etc - vaping can really scramble all that up so you have fewer situational triggers.