JUUL was the only thing that got me off a pack-a-day 13 year habit. I think very highly of the product and it is a shame teenagers made it so 'cool'. (Much like cigarettes at one time...)
My dad swore off of drugs and alcohol, and always said he wanted to work until the day he dies. He's instead spent the last 10 years dying of Alzheimer's.
For what it's worth, I'm inclined to follow my dad's approach. Perhaps with a different interpretation of retiring when I die. But there are some games you just can't win.
This is very true, but try switching to Swedish snus. Dipping tobacco still has a lot of cancer risk, whereas snus doesn't, really, so you can take your time quitting. It's the difference between roasted and steamed tobacco; it's the combustion products that get you.
Basically, since 2005, the nitrotesimne levels in US Style smokeless tobacco has declined by more than 75% due to changes in manufacturing (largely), and from say, 80mg to 5mg, in the 1975-2016 period.
Tobacco Specific Nitrosamines are widely acknowledged to be the single largest cancer causing agent in oral tobacco. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco-specific_nitrosamines)
https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2016/07/is-snus-safer-...
https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-evidence-...
https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2012/01/informative-st...
Anecdotally, I've had 2 experiences with people like that. One was a coder who was self employed and worked out of his house, and another was my auto mechanic before I moved. Both always had a cig burning sitting burning in an ashtray but only picked up and consumed maybe 25% of it while they were working.
In some places, cigs might cost $15/pack (your numbers), but I just passed by a Chevron gas station selling for $7 where I live (Portland, OR). The cost depends greatly on the local/state taxes and is not indicative of everywhere. A carton of Marlboros here (the most expensive brand) is around $60 ($6/pack). A quick scan of this table [1] shows rates by state. A cursory look shows a tax range of about 0.37% (Georgia) to 4.5% (DC), but those are only the state taxes and don't take into account other local taxes. I'm just pointing out your example of $30/day (I assume where you live) is quite different from $12/day where I live, and there are even cheaper places than where I live. Portland isn't exactly the boonies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_...
That describes pretty well how I smoke the ecig: all day long, maybe three puffs every few minutes. While the normal cigs (maybe four a day) I inhale greedily at high speed.
This wasn't me at all when I smoked two packs a day. I smoked the entire cigarette, and if I was going to put it down for a while, I put it out. And that was when they were cheap.
You just smoke all the time. The first thing I did when I woke up was light a cigarette, before I got out of bed. You choke a couple of cigarettes down during your break, not just one. You smoke through lunch. I was probably 5-7 cigarettes in before I even got to work.
I started Juul in late 2017, was off smoking completely by April 2018 (3 pods a day) and quit Juul cold turkey January 1st, 2019. I’d tried to quit millions of times over 10 years, but Juul made it easy.
This rings absurdly true with me. I realized at some point that a cigarette was a little celebration ritual that I went through after completing anything.
It's also why I'm negative on vaping as a tool for quitting; it doesn't get rid of that ritual part. Snus (someone else also mentioned dipping elsewhere in the thread) does. Entirely quitting the impulse to the ritual took me a good two years, and having the nicotine hit from the snus helped me through it. Quitting the snus was a fairly miserable two weeks.
I'm not denouncing vapes, though, because although I don't think they're good for quitting nicotine addiction, they're good for quitting cigarettes, and that's good enough to lengthen your lifespan by 2-3 years, and the lifespan of your lungs by 10-20 probably. I don't know that we know what the long term effects of inhaling propylene glycol are, but there's no doubt there's a better outlook than cig smoke. I just can't help but recall how gross and unpleasant inhaling what smoke machines produced was when I was in a touring band.
edit: entirely incidentally, I feel that ritual made me more productive. Between cigarettes, I felt like I was supposed to do something before the next cigarette. It was like: finish writing that function, smoke, get to the point where I can run tests, smoke while the tests were running, get to the point where I can run benchmarks, smoke while benchmarks are running, get to the point where I can hand things off - make the call to the person I have to hand it to, smoke.
After quitting, life seems more dreamy, spacey, and unstructured. I think that's a point for vaping, although I think the fact that cigs are discrete units that lower in quality slightly after having been put out is both a factor affecting the ritual, and a quality that vaping does not have.
Quit smoking at least 7 years ago, so this isn't just addict wistfulness.