Nicotine is an empty habit, says a part-time smoker, It only works together with the other alkaloids out of tobacco, of which probably harmaline is the primary one and then I could rather just take peganum harmala (didn't so far, customs seized two of two attempts). My try of vaping led to a strong habit, every hour or two I felt my energy levels to plummet and needed to take a few hits, with tobacco it remains to be mental, for whatever reason. I suspect the higher totally absorbed amount of nicotine to be the reasson.
You think you got a worse habit from vaping than from smoking cigarettes? I was lucky to never get *that* addicted to tobacco (...unlike almost everything else I tried). But when I used to be a smoker, I would at least feel some kind of "withdrawal" when I couldn't smoke for a day or more, at least on the level of psychological "craving."
Whereas since I've been vaping, I can basically use it to my heart's content everyday and still leave it alone for long periods without any cravings to speak of. And on the occasions I've smoked a cigarette after I switched to vaping, they've given me a much more intense "rush" (bodily and mentally) as well as stronger feeling of pleasure than I could ever achieve with vaping. My anecdotal experiences seem to match up quite well the scientific literature I've looked at, which essentially sees the naturally occurring MAOIs in tobacco to be crucial to its unique effects (and especially to the smoking of cigarettes which also get treated synthetically.
There's been a lot of hysteria over teenagers vaping in the US (including PSAs showing Juuls turning kids into strung-out junkies robbing their families). Even if you set aside how many harms would be reduced if the younger generations only got hooked on vaping for the rest of their lives, avoiding all the cancer-causing attributes of tobacco, it's not at all clear that vaped nicotine is even "addictive" in a scientifically proven way.
From the reading that I did on the issue, nicotine's "addictive" qualities are mostly supported by weak
post hoc reasoning that works backwards from the legitimate empirical finding that tobacco is generally addictive. By asserting an (unsupported) identity relation between nicotine's effects and tobacco's effects, the anti-vape lobby concludes that it must be the nicotine must be addictive
eo ipso, and making any nicotine product addictive. IIRC, the addictiveness of nicotine has been "proven" only through tobacco studies, not studies exploring whether pure-nicotine products -- like Nicorette gum or Nicoderm patches or vapes for that matter -- can even be demonstrated to have addictive powers.[/i]
