Item — HN Reader

I can't speak for Juul but I credit my smoking cessation entirely to vaping. I've not had any nicotine since 2020, vaping or smoking!

I think there's a real attitude among a small number of non-smokers that quitting without some form of sustained suffering is "doing it wrong" and that addicts of any kind deserve pain to atone for the sin of being an addict. This attitude is extremely unhelpful and should be condemned along with all other types of moral puritanism in my opinion.

3 comments

It may not be "doing it wrong" but different people work in different ways. I know one friend who tried to quit a couple of times by easing off with no luck. However one time they decided to just stop and it worked. They felt like crap for a week or two but then they were off it.

Whether easing off is more or less effective than cold turkey, and for whom, is a technical matter. GP is talking about something orthogonal: some people believe that breaking addiction requires suffering, so if you found a way to avoid it, you've somehow cheated, or hadn't really quit.

I'm not against people quitting cold turkey if that's what works for them, addiction is different for everyone and if that's the most effective way of quitting for a person then fair enough. What I'm against is non-smokers preaching that it's the only way as opposed to something like vaping when they're in no position to make such a claim.

I don't think anything along those lines but I am extremely disappointed that another generation is hooked on nicotine through vaping. You hear kids bragging about how much 'nic' they go through.

I was always confused about that particular part of smoking culture, it's got this mixed message of bad-boy persona and defiance yet it's very much a corporate curated habit. Nobody should have ended up addicted to nicotine, it was entirely unnecessary, and now here we are again even after all those lessons learned.

I am glad it's not nearly as harmful as cigarettes, but people are once again being sucked into an addiction in order to buy product and that stinks.

Congrats! Quitting smoking is really difficult; I feel lucky to have kicked it myself. I started in high school, like many folks (especially in the southern US); and was on-and-off through college. A Juul really helped me power through times of stress without buying a pack of cigarettes. I remember e-cigs were initially pitched to consumers as a way to quit smoking, and I think it's unfortunate that part of the message seems to have fallen off. I think it was a huge part of tapering the dependence, for me.

Cheers! And yeah I started around the same sort of time in my life, about 17 years old. When I was at uni me and my mates bought vapes because around the time they hadn't been banned by most pubs yet so we could use them inside, West Wales is a bastard of a place to be a smoker in the winter! I was the only smoker at my current job when I started though, so I went on just the vape as not to be the only one reeking of cigarettes. Once the social aspect of smoking was gone it just became a bit of a shackle rather than a break for me so I decided to taper down and quit by the start of 2020 which turned out to be an outstanding move!