Nicotine by itself is less physically addicting than caffeine, and no more harmful. It’s the 9000 other chemicals in cigarette smoke that increase the addictive properties and cause cancer.
A large part of the reason smoking is so addictive is because it integrates into every part of your life. This is why vaping is by far the most successful method of quitting smoking.
Also, in the US it’s illegal to sell nicotine of any form to anyone under 21. But kids will always do the things we tell them not to do exactly because we tell them not to do them. I’d 100% prefer a kid vape than smoke.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive wtf are you talking about. I smoked cigarettes for 6 years and then used a vape to quit cigarettes, it took about 3 months to wean myself off cigarettes and get used to vaping full time. My original plan was to use a vape to get off nicotine completely by gradually lowering my nicotine from 24MG to 0MG of nicotine in my vape juice but that didn’t work.
Now here I am 8 years later, vaping my 3MG juice daily and just as additiced to the vape as I was to cigarettes. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes, as soon as I finish eating I pull out my vape, I wake up and have coffee, I pull out my vape, I have some drinks I have a vape. Nicotine is nicotine regardless of how you get it. I’ve literally tried to quit by going to 0MG juice or going cold turkey 6 times over those 8 years and I just can’t do it. It’s to fucking hard. I’ve given up on trying to quit because life sucks and I have no good reason to quit anymore, getting lung cancer is basically my retirement plan at this point. (no clue what the actual health effects are regarding vapes, I’m just being hyperbolic)
Don’t get me wrong, vaping is definitely a MUCH better alternative than smoking cigarettes but don’t try and downplay just how addictive nicotine is. Nobody should touch nicotine vapes unless you’re using it to quit cigarettes.
I 100% agree that kids will get a hold of vapes or smokes regardless of whether it’s legal or not to sell it to underagers, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Vaping is definitely preferable to smoking, but not getting addicted to nicotine is WAY better than either of those options.
Former smoker here. Instead of trying to use zero nicotine juice. Take advantage of the fact that you can control how many drags you take per session. For me I hit a cig about 10 times. So when I vaped I was sure to only hit it 10 times. Then I lowered the hits from 10 to about 3 and from there I was able to cold turkey.
I don’t think they’re intentionally downplaying how addictive nicotine is, I think you’re underestimating how addictive caffeine is. Caffeine is ridiculously addictive, it just doesn’t seem that way because its use is normalized. Try skipping caffeine for a full week and see how that goes for you. In my experience, going without caffeine is way more painful than going without nicotine. Going without nicotine makes me kinda groggy and irritable. Going without caffeine gives me headaches, makes me achey and feel mildly ill, and I don’t drink a lot of caffeine to begin with (I typically drink a single soda throughout the day, rarely coffee or energy drinks).
. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes
And there you go, you’re not addicted to nicotine. You’re addicted to your habit. It’s why I can’t stop biting my nails, they don’t have any drugs in them at all, yet I’ve been doing it all my life and have tried to stop multiple times.
Dude that guy said very clearly his method was to lower the nicotine dose in his vape to ween down to 0mg/nicotine free vape. He isn’t trying to quit the habit, you didn’t even read his post.
Why did you reply again without reading either post?
The post said they are trying to vape and gradually reduce their nicotine intake to 0. I don’t know how it can be made any more clear in stating that their near term goal is not to stop vaping, but to reduce the nicotine dose in the vape to 0.
They are trying to reduce their nicotine dosage in their vape but due to their addiction, are having withdrawals and ultimately re-adding the dose. This is 100% due to nicotine, they are not trying to reduce how many times they inhale the vape.
You’re talking out of your arse pal. Nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes and vape fluid. Furthermore, it is still toxic, but vaping is simply less harmful than smoking - not harmless.
From my own experience of quitting smoking, I can tell that you’re spreading lies.
I was on IQOS before I quit entirely and let me tell you, the addiction was real, I couldn’t think straight, I was extremely dizzy all the time and generally unusable for pretty much anything.
I had to take some meds to actually help me with the physical withdrawal symptoms, otherwise I would be of no use for 3-5 days (or so I’ve read) which I couldn’t really afford at that time.
You where trying to break a physical habit. Nicotine is not a super addictive drug. It’s why pipe and cigar smokers aren’t addicted to smoking. Most of us quit in the winter months with no issues because we’ve not created a habit of smoking 5 cigars a day. It’s the same reason vaping has such a good track record of getting people to stop smoking and then quitting vaping, were the drugs the pharma companies sell that are NRT like patches and pills have like a %10 success rate and people relapse to the sticks constantly, even though they’re getting the same or more amount of nicotine from the patch or drug than from cigs.
I am having real difficulties deciphering your comment… the reason pipe and cigar smokers have an easier time quitting is due to lower intake of nicotine because it’s generally a more casual habit. Vapers tend to vape as often or more often than smokers smoke… and vaping is, itself, highly addictive. Your comment is full of quite a few logical statements tied together with giant unsubstantiated leaps of faith.
If you think cigars have lower amounts of nicotine in them vs cigs…I got bad news for you. Most cig smokers get sick from cigars. Snus and nasal snuff also carry a lot of nicotine in them, but easy to stop as well.
I don’t think that pipe tobacco or cigars are inherently more healthy… but most consumers smoke significantly less frequently than cigarettes. I agree that smoking twelve cigars a day is definitely worse than twelve cigarettes… I’m not familiar enough to know anything more precise than that though.
IQOS is not a vape it’s a “heat not burn” product. Completely different category of product and very much not only nicotine when it comes to neurologically active substances, but the whole cigarette spectrum of stuff.
Our heated tobacco devices are electronic devices that heat real tobacco.
Sometimes these are also called “e-cigarettes”. But they’re definitely not vapes, which are devices which vaporise a mixture of (generally speaking) propylene glycol, glycerine, water, nicotine, and aroma, no plant matter, no tobacco, involved. You can even get nicotine that’s not derived from tobacco if you care (IIRC they use tomatoes but any nightshade has nicotine, you only need to extract and refine it).
Truly, I cannot fathom the mind of someone who sticks a literal stick of literal tobacco held together by literal paper, just like a literal cigarette, into their device and thinks that that’s the same as squirting liquid into a tank.
Just for a record: Dizziness is not a nicotine overdose. At low doses it excites, then it calms, then it makes you dizzy, and several parsecs beyond that you lose consciousness, and even more parsecs beyond that you die, which would be an actual overdose.
It’s actually quite hard to do. Trying it orally will make you puke as nicotine is a powerful emetic, via the skin you have to literally bathe in high concentrations. Intravenous would be easy but lots of things are fucking dangerous when you put them in a syringe with pointy end. Pretty much the only realistic variant is having high-purity nicotine (which isn’t available on the open market), taking enough of a whiff to directly lose consciousness, and then lie in the fumes for a while.
It’s actually much easier to overdose on caffeine though probably still close to impossible by extracting coffee.
…that might’ve taken a dark turn. In any case if you continue when you’re dizzy, when your mind isn’t actually enjoying the act, you aren’t serving your nicotine addiction but your habits. And withdrawal from habits can feel physical, that’s for sure.
Now of course the term “overdose” is kind of fuzzy, in a personal sense you might say “yo I ate too many cherries, now my stomach hurts”. But in a medical sense that’s not an overdose: You’re simply at a point where you get a clear-cut signal from your body that it’s time to stop, powerful enough to overpower “mmmh cherries, tasty”, you are nowhere close to having to have your stomach pumped.
Also on a more general note be careful about public health information about nicotine, much of it still hasn’t been corrected.
And yeah, the lethality of it is way over stated. Especially the “it can be super absorbed by the skin” stuff. I’ve spilt 250mg of nicotine on my hands and left it for a few minutes before washing it off, and all that happened was the spot was tingly for a minute or two.
But then there wouldn’t be a difference between a plain junkie and someone who overdoses on heroin. The medically recommended dose of diamorphine in both cases was zero.
What distinguishes those two cases is that one exceeded the effective dose. “Recommended dose” here doesn’t mean “what a doctor tells you” but “more than needed to achieve an intended effect”. For some getting past the boosting effect of nicotine into the depressing effect range might be an overdose. Yet others might enjoy some brief dizziness in an armchair.
Toxicologically speaking nicotine has quite low overdose toxicity because any serious symptoms happen way after any desirable symptom. Toxicity, though, is what pedestrians generally think of when they hear “overdose” so that is what I focussed on.
Nicotine by itself is less physically addicting than caffeine, and no more harmful. It’s the 9000 other chemicals in cigarette smoke that increase the addictive properties and cause cancer.
A large part of the reason smoking is so addictive is because it integrates into every part of your life. This is why vaping is by far the most successful method of quitting smoking.
Also, in the US it’s illegal to sell nicotine of any form to anyone under 21. But kids will always do the things we tell them not to do exactly because we tell them not to do them. I’d 100% prefer a kid vape than smoke.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive wtf are you talking about. I smoked cigarettes for 6 years and then used a vape to quit cigarettes, it took about 3 months to wean myself off cigarettes and get used to vaping full time. My original plan was to use a vape to get off nicotine completely by gradually lowering my nicotine from 24MG to 0MG of nicotine in my vape juice but that didn’t work.
Now here I am 8 years later, vaping my 3MG juice daily and just as additiced to the vape as I was to cigarettes. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes, as soon as I finish eating I pull out my vape, I wake up and have coffee, I pull out my vape, I have some drinks I have a vape. Nicotine is nicotine regardless of how you get it. I’ve literally tried to quit by going to 0MG juice or going cold turkey 6 times over those 8 years and I just can’t do it. It’s to fucking hard. I’ve given up on trying to quit because life sucks and I have no good reason to quit anymore, getting lung cancer is basically my retirement plan at this point. (no clue what the actual health effects are regarding vapes, I’m just being hyperbolic)
Don’t get me wrong, vaping is definitely a MUCH better alternative than smoking cigarettes but don’t try and downplay just how addictive nicotine is. Nobody should touch nicotine vapes unless you’re using it to quit cigarettes.
I 100% agree that kids will get a hold of vapes or smokes regardless of whether it’s legal or not to sell it to underagers, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Vaping is definitely preferable to smoking, but not getting addicted to nicotine is WAY better than either of those options.
Don’t downplay how addictive nicotine is.
Former smoker here. Instead of trying to use zero nicotine juice. Take advantage of the fact that you can control how many drags you take per session. For me I hit a cig about 10 times. So when I vaped I was sure to only hit it 10 times. Then I lowered the hits from 10 to about 3 and from there I was able to cold turkey.
I don’t think they’re intentionally downplaying how addictive nicotine is, I think you’re underestimating how addictive caffeine is. Caffeine is ridiculously addictive, it just doesn’t seem that way because its use is normalized. Try skipping caffeine for a full week and see how that goes for you. In my experience, going without caffeine is way more painful than going without nicotine. Going without nicotine makes me kinda groggy and irritable. Going without caffeine gives me headaches, makes me achey and feel mildly ill, and I don’t drink a lot of caffeine to begin with (I typically drink a single soda throughout the day, rarely coffee or energy drinks).
And there you go, you’re not addicted to nicotine. You’re addicted to your habit. It’s why I can’t stop biting my nails, they don’t have any drugs in them at all, yet I’ve been doing it all my life and have tried to stop multiple times.
Habits easy to form and super hard to break.
Dude that guy said very clearly his method was to lower the nicotine dose in his vape to ween down to 0mg/nicotine free vape. He isn’t trying to quit the habit, you didn’t even read his post.
You might want to understand what a habit is. The nicotine isn’t what kept him hooked, the habit of it is.
Why did you reply again without reading either post?
The post said they are trying to vape and gradually reduce their nicotine intake to 0. I don’t know how it can be made any more clear in stating that their near term goal is not to stop vaping, but to reduce the nicotine dose in the vape to 0.
They are trying to reduce their nicotine dosage in their vape but due to their addiction, are having withdrawals and ultimately re-adding the dose. This is 100% due to nicotine, they are not trying to reduce how many times they inhale the vape.
Re-read what I said. I said physically addictive, not mentally.
You’re talking out of your arse pal. Nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes and vape fluid. Furthermore, it is still toxic, but vaping is simply less harmful than smoking - not harmless.
From my own experience of quitting smoking, I can tell that you’re spreading lies.
I was on IQOS before I quit entirely and let me tell you, the addiction was real, I couldn’t think straight, I was extremely dizzy all the time and generally unusable for pretty much anything.
I had to take some meds to actually help me with the physical withdrawal symptoms, otherwise I would be of no use for 3-5 days (or so I’ve read) which I couldn’t really afford at that time.
You where trying to break a physical habit. Nicotine is not a super addictive drug. It’s why pipe and cigar smokers aren’t addicted to smoking. Most of us quit in the winter months with no issues because we’ve not created a habit of smoking 5 cigars a day. It’s the same reason vaping has such a good track record of getting people to stop smoking and then quitting vaping, were the drugs the pharma companies sell that are NRT like patches and pills have like a %10 success rate and people relapse to the sticks constantly, even though they’re getting the same or more amount of nicotine from the patch or drug than from cigs.
I broke my addiction to nicotine, which is indeed very addictive. Not sure what your half-truths really are good for.
I am having real difficulties deciphering your comment… the reason pipe and cigar smokers have an easier time quitting is due to lower intake of nicotine because it’s generally a more casual habit. Vapers tend to vape as often or more often than smokers smoke… and vaping is, itself, highly addictive. Your comment is full of quite a few logical statements tied together with giant unsubstantiated leaps of faith.
If you think cigars have lower amounts of nicotine in them vs cigs…I got bad news for you. Most cig smokers get sick from cigars. Snus and nasal snuff also carry a lot of nicotine in them, but easy to stop as well.
I don’t think that pipe tobacco or cigars are inherently more healthy… but most consumers smoke significantly less frequently than cigarettes. I agree that smoking twelve cigars a day is definitely worse than twelve cigarettes… I’m not familiar enough to know anything more precise than that though.
IQOS is not a vape it’s a “heat not burn” product. Completely different category of product and very much not only nicotine when it comes to neurologically active substances, but the whole cigarette spectrum of stuff.
Yeah, that’s nonsense.
Quoth their own site:
Sometimes these are also called “e-cigarettes”. But they’re definitely not vapes, which are devices which vaporise a mixture of (generally speaking) propylene glycol, glycerine, water, nicotine, and aroma, no plant matter, no tobacco, involved. You can even get nicotine that’s not derived from tobacco if you care (IIRC they use tomatoes but any nightshade has nicotine, you only need to extract and refine it).
Truly, I cannot fathom the mind of someone who sticks a literal stick of literal tobacco held together by literal paper, just like a literal cigarette, into their device and thinks that that’s the same as squirting liquid into a tank.
IQOS is still not nicotine on its own, and if the symptoms you described were while you were using the IQOS, it sounds like a nicotine overdose.
Just for a record: Dizziness is not a nicotine overdose. At low doses it excites, then it calms, then it makes you dizzy, and several parsecs beyond that you lose consciousness, and even more parsecs beyond that you die, which would be an actual overdose.
It’s actually quite hard to do. Trying it orally will make you puke as nicotine is a powerful emetic, via the skin you have to literally bathe in high concentrations. Intravenous would be easy but lots of things are fucking dangerous when you put them in a syringe with pointy end. Pretty much the only realistic variant is having high-purity nicotine (which isn’t available on the open market), taking enough of a whiff to directly lose consciousness, and then lie in the fumes for a while.
It’s actually much easier to overdose on caffeine though probably still close to impossible by extracting coffee.
…that might’ve taken a dark turn. In any case if you continue when you’re dizzy, when your mind isn’t actually enjoying the act, you aren’t serving your nicotine addiction but your habits. And withdrawal from habits can feel physical, that’s for sure.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21582-nicotine-poisoning#symptoms-and-causes
Dizziness is absolutely a symptom of a nicotine overdose.
Note how it says “early phase symptoms”?
Now of course the term “overdose” is kind of fuzzy, in a personal sense you might say “yo I ate too many cherries, now my stomach hurts”. But in a medical sense that’s not an overdose: You’re simply at a point where you get a clear-cut signal from your body that it’s time to stop, powerful enough to overpower “mmmh cherries, tasty”, you are nowhere close to having to have your stomach pumped.
Also on a more general note be careful about public health information about nicotine, much of it still hasn’t been corrected.
In a medical sense an overdose is just taking more than the recommended dose. That clear cut signal from your body is a symptom of an overdose.
And yeah, the lethality of it is way over stated. Especially the “it can be super absorbed by the skin” stuff. I’ve spilt 250mg of nicotine on my hands and left it for a few minutes before washing it off, and all that happened was the spot was tingly for a minute or two.
But then there wouldn’t be a difference between a plain junkie and someone who overdoses on heroin. The medically recommended dose of diamorphine in both cases was zero.
What distinguishes those two cases is that one exceeded the effective dose. “Recommended dose” here doesn’t mean “what a doctor tells you” but “more than needed to achieve an intended effect”. For some getting past the boosting effect of nicotine into the depressing effect range might be an overdose. Yet others might enjoy some brief dizziness in an armchair.
Toxicologically speaking nicotine has quite low overdose toxicity because any serious symptoms happen way after any desirable symptom. Toxicity, though, is what pedestrians generally think of when they hear “overdose” so that is what I focussed on.