Cigarettes contain tobacco, which in turn contains nicotine. We know now that nicotine is addictive and it’s at least part of the reason why many smokers continue to smoke even after they no longer have a desire to do so. This is where vaping comes in. With vaping, the nicotine is still present, but in a much more controllable fashion. With the e-liquid that vapes use, the amount of nicotine present can be controlled right down to the milligram.
Controlling The Nicotine Dose
Heavy smokers can opt for high strength e-liquids while light smokers can choose low strength e-liquids. The choices vary greatly and the options themselves present smokers with the ability to customize their vaping experience to fit their nicotine dependency.
The Gradual Reduction
This also allows those who use high amounts of nicotine to gradually (or not so gradually) reduce the amount of nicotine that they’re using without adjusting their actual puffs per day. So if you’re taking, just as a random number, 50 puffs per day, you can continue to do so while using a vape juice with half the nicotine strength, effectively cutting your nicotine intake in half.
Quitting Nicotine With 0mg E-Liquid
By reducing the nicotine concentration in the e-liquid used, vapers who are formerly smokers can reduce the amount of nicotine that they’re using until they’ve reached the sought after zero, as in no nicotine.
None of this is an option with smokers. With cigarettes, you’re either smoking or you’re not. You can’t buy nicotine-free cigarettes because they just don’t exist. Tobacco contains nicotine and cigarettes use tobacco, that’s all there is to it. But with vaping, e-juice is available in a wide range of nicotine strengths that allow vapers to choose how much nicotine they want and this includes none, as is in nicotine-free (0mg) e-liquid.
Vaping Feels Similar To Smoking
Vaping doesn’t just look a lot like smoking due to the clouds of vapor that are inhaled and exhaled, similar to the smoke from a cigarette, it also feels similar. Not the same, but similar. For former smokers, this can help. Where patches are nothing like lighting a cigarette and taking a puff, e-cigarettes are. You inhale the vapor and then exhale it much like the smoke from a cigarette.
Vaping Is Less Harmful
It might look and feel like smoking to some, but vaping is inherently different. For starters, there isn’t any tar in the vapor that e-cigs produce. Tar is contained within the smoke that is produced by traditional cigarettes, but it’s not present in the vapor produced through vaping an e-cigarette. There are, from what science tells us, fewer chemicals contained within an e-cig’s vapor in comparison to cigarette smoke.
In the United Kingdom, there is a regularly updated e-cigarette evidence review that’s carried out by independent experts working on behalf of Public Health England. This review, which was mandated by the government, has found e-cigs to likely be much less harmful than cigarettes. This has led the government to launch programs aimed at pushing smokers who have been unable to quit smoking to take up vaping instead. We call this harm reduction and it’s one of the reasons why many of today’s vapers have switched from smoking to vaping.
Public Health England is by no means the only ones pushing for harm reduction through vaping, as a study carried out by researchers at the University of New South Wales argues that doctors should recommend vaping to patients who smoke once everything else has failed.
The Summary
To summarize what we’re saying, vaping works because it provides nicotine and it delivers it in a fashion that’s similar to smoking, only less harmful. As for the University of New South Wales study that argues in favor of doctors recommending vaping to patients who smoke that have been unsuccessful in their quit attempts using traditional smoking cessations like nicotine gum and nicotine patches, a more recent study has found e-cigarettes to be nearly twice as effective as gums and patches. So perhaps it’s better for smokers to jump straight to vaping without first going through the hassles of trying the gums and patches. Regardless of whether or not this is the case, one thing has become clear over the years since vaping has been around: smokers can use vaping to quit smoking and from what we understand at the moment, they should.
