My name is James and vaping changed my life!
On a cold afternoon on 12/23/2011 I stepped outside the back door of my home and smoked my final cigarette. As I stood there shivering in the cold, feeling the burn of the smoke as I drew it into my lungs, I wondered how difficult it would be for me to stop using them. Just a few days ago I had left the doctors office where he had told me that the bad bronchial infection I had wasn’t just a seasonal woe (I had coughed so much that my throat was raw and my head pounding) Shortness of breath, smelly clothes, halitosis. This was all the norm for me but just inside the door of my house was a box with my first e-cig and an assortment of liquids.
I dropped the remains of my cig to the ground and ground it out with my heel and then stepped inside. After a few minutes of assembling my new e-cig, I dripped some 18mg menthol tobacco on the atomizer and took a long slow drag. Hrmm, It didn’t taste exactly the same as a regular cig but there was something I liked about it. It was clean tasting, my tongue didn’t burn. I tried a few other flavors but couldnt tell apple from apricot since my tongue and nose was still full of smoke particles from that last analog….
(fast forward to 2 weeks later)
Discovered the joys of actually tasting my food. I never realized how crippling the cigarettes were to my olfactory senses and tastebuds. The wife actually allowed me to use my ecig inside the house and found some of the flavors quite pleasant. I wasn’t wheezing anymore! I’d discovered that Apple/Strawberry/Menthol was my favorite flavor and would be for some time to come….
(Current day)
That was just a brief synopsis of the early months of my journey into using a THR (Tobacco Harm Reduction) product. Since then I’ve obviously reaped the longer term benefits of being smoke free and I’ve also learned a lot about what goes into the product I’ve been using. Obviously many of you are probably familiar with PG/VG/NIC/Flavoring but let’s talk about nicotine.
Nicotine is an alkaloid in the same family as Caffeine (Coffee, Soda, Energy Drinks) and Theobromine (Chocolate) They are all stimulants with different types of effects on the human body. I believe Nicotine has been wrongfully demonized since in it’s pure extracted form it is not carcinogenic. Obviously at the current time, the mainstream media has been littered with anti-ecig articles and stories.
Over the course of the last 2 years, I’ve had the privilege of being able to help at least 30+ people that I know personally to take back their health and their lives from the addiction to cigarettes that they had once been a slave to.
With legislation looming and with our friends in the EU currently fighting for their right to vape, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what our future may look like as vapers. The best thing we can do is to get the word out there on how it has transformed our lives and the lives of those we know and love. It may be a gradual change but I’m confident that once more people have seen how it can be a catalyst for good, they will come around.
