Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

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I think the key with vaping (not necessarily with Juul though due to market availability) is that it's very easy to decrease the dosage of nicotine without reducing the fixation amount. For traditional cigarette smoking you want a high amount of nicotine to fill that void (and also to get through the other side of other addictive substances in tobacco beyond nicotine) and to effectively "get hooked" on vaping instead, to the point that normal cigarettes are completely unattractive to you.. Afterwards, decreasing dosage with a vape is super easy, especially if done in a blind way, ie, buying two identical flavors at different dosages (your "normal" and the lower dose) and put them into two carts. Pick a random one each day to use. I've heard of people doing this all the way down to 3mg to get over the lowest dosage hump even. One has no nicotine, the other only has 3mg. Eventually the non-social fixation (ie, at your house alone) stops, and the social fixation (ie, outside of a bar, etc) is controllable with no nicotine... Then that's not even getting into the different ohm ratings etc that further control dosage without affecting the fixation of using the vape.

edit: note I say "easy", but its not a short process.. If you try to go immediately from 48mg to 3mg you won't have a good time. It takes months for each step down

Nicotine's method of action for addiction isn't commonly understood very well. It's extremely specific - nicotine works to make the things you do around the exposure more habitual. If it's slapping on a nicotine patch and going on a run, you're more likely to get into a habit of slapping on a patch and going on a run. If it's taking a break outside and puffing from a vaporizer, then it's simply taking a break and puffing from a vaporizer.

That's largely why e-cigs are the most successful way to quit smoking tobacco products - it's the most similar habit to smoking cigarettes, so it slots into the existing highly-reinforced habits that smokers have. You drop a bunch of the random other chemicals that are present in cigarettes, and wind up reinforcing the replacement habit before dropping dosages and having a regular habit that's as easy to quit as, say, biting your fingernails.

Thing is, the fact that you can reduce the nicotine dosage does not necessarily mean that people will; unlike cigarettes, it's trivial to also increase the nicotine dosage many times.

I don't think a significant amount of people do that. Coming from someone with a lot of experience vaping (actually helped me quit smoking), it's somewhat difficult to find ejuices with pleasant flavors (anything that's not a stereotypical cigarette flavor like menthol) above 6mg, and around 9mg or higher, the nicotine flavor becomes quite pronounced and overpowering, and your flavor options are severely limited.

I started experimenting with nicotine gum as a non-smoker. From what I've read, the method you get your nicotine has a major effect on level of addiction. Inhalation combines a habitual act with the near instanaeous activation time to create a highly addictive behavioural habit.

I chew one 4mg piece of gum over the course of a day for mental stimulation and that's had some really nice side effects for me, such as being able to stay up later and continue on mentally engaging work.

I have a friend who did that for a few months and it took her iirc 2 years to get over the gum fixation.. even without nicotine, she always had to have some gum for cravings

I think she was chewing the nicotine gum a few times a day, but I'd still be careful about it.. iirc the reason she did it was she wanted gum and the only gum her parents had regularly was nicotine gum and she was like 14 at the time

> I think the key with vaping (not necessarily with Juul though due to market availability) is that it's very easy to decrease the dosage of nicotine without reducing the fixation amount.

There's some truth to this. I used to believe it wholly. You can go through my comment history and see that I've mentioned it before on Juul-related threads.

My more recently-developed stance is that it doesn't work as well as you'd think it does. It may work for some people, in some situations, but the reality is that your body can become surprisingly good at figuring out that its not getting the nicotine it wants, so you may just end up vaping the lower stuff more often. The double-blind thing honestly wouldn't work for real addicts; it may even be subconscious, but the body knows. You can't trick yourself out of a nicotine addiction.

The ritual is a big part of the addiction, and if you're not careful in regulating the number of pulls you're just going to make the ritual worse, without changing the amount of nicotine you pull in.

If you can combine it with some kind of regimen, like you don't pull more often than once every ten minutes, then sure, that could work. That's why it works for some people; not the strict reduction in potency.

My own experience FWIW: I had no problems going from half a pack a day to a 3mg liquid + half a pack a week.

I found that with vaping I just bought more Juul pods. Cheap, easy, minimal immediate side effects.

Tobacco had similar issues but I just couldn't smoke tons of cigarettes all day.

Both bad, I think stepping down nicotine works for some but not for me. You gotta do what you can to quit :)

and if you're using a tank system or filling your carts, you can mix your own dosage from 0% + something else. or just stay at 0%.

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