Quitting smoking is tough; if it were not so onerous, everyone threatened with health issues exacerbated by puffing on a cigarette would give up in a heartbeat. It’s potentially fatal for a person’s health, it’s expensive, it’s socially divisive, and it ruins clothes, wallpaper and the interior of cars. A person smoking 20 premium cigarettes a day will spend around £2,900 a year on smoking, and that cost increases every year when the government raises its taxes.
So why don’t people quit? It’s very simple – it’s an addiction, and one with the same hold on old and young, rich or poor, male or female and any other social group one wishes to mention. Even a figure as powerful as president Obama, whose administration has poured millions of dollars into trying to get US citizens to quit the habit, still enjoys the odd cigarette (allegedly).
The alternatives to smoking are numerous, and many of the more successful ones involve substitution of some kind, rather than going cold turkey and falling apart when one cigarette passes the lips. One of them, made possible through the testing of companies such as EL-Science, is vaping.
According to recent data from ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) the number of vapers in the UK rose by half a million last year, from 2.1 million to 2.6 million. It’s a similar story in the US, where vaping has risen in usage by 2.6% of the American population in 2013 to 10% now. Note – that could include a handful of low-nicotine vapes, or 50 a day at 24mg of nicotine. Both would presumably count as addiction, even though the former is barely taking in any nicotine worth mentioning.
Still, it is an addiction, albeit one enthusiastically endorsed by those who have converted. One such case study is Candi McCann, who cracked a 21-year smoking habit to turn to vaping. “I’m not going to tell you this is healthy,” said McCann in this article at Gazettextra, “But I can tell you that it is 99 per cent better for you than smoking.”
McCann is such a devotee that she has become a manager at a local vaping store and there is a burgeoning community of vapers who agree with her summation. They seemingly have no desire to leave the habit alone; vaping has become part of their lives and who they are, a social fix that tobacco didn’t have. There’s nothing to suggest that they cannot give up, just that they don’t.
Another fan is the eloquent writer Will Self, who swapped 40 years of smoking (at one point chugging down 100 a day) for vaping, and doesn’t even regard them as anything approaching the same experience. Self describes vaping to Esquire Magazine as “smoking digitised and rendered harmless – it was one small puff for a man, one giant hit for mankind!” but he admits it is an addiction, and believes that its usage will one day be controlled by medical prescription.
He maintains that this is a bad thing, and lacking in excitement, but those who are suffering from bronchitis, heart and lung disease and general poor health courtesy of cigarettes might not be so sure. Nicotine is addictive, and in that regard a vaper faces exactly the same battle as a smoker to get rid of that buzz, but at least it would seem a step in the right di
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