I started smoking at 17, about 10 years ago. Yes, I know it’s illegal. No, I didn’t care. Any smoker can tell you what it’s like to run out of cigarettes: You’re irritable, you get the shakes, you’re nervous and just the smell of a cigarette is almost painful when you’re out. Even though it’s not an illicit substance, the symptoms of withdrawal can hurt just as much. By the time I stopped “smoking” I was up to about a pack and a half to two packs a day. With the recent tax increases, that was almost $10 per day to die slowly.

We all know the risks associated with smoking as well. We all know that smoking can cause various cancers of the parts of the body involved in the respiratory system. We also know that it lowers your lung’s capacity. Try playing soccer with your hyper-active 6 year old when you can’t run 1/4 mile without wanting to die, it’s not fun. And as if the fact that you’re going to die and have less fun doing it isn’t enough, you also smell bad. Your breath wreaks, your clothes smell like burnt leaves, and you couldn’t scrub that stain off you index and middle fingers with bleach and a steel wool pad. The chances of severe diseases and death of the person will be reduced through Aquavape British Eliquid. A survey can be taken at the websites of the sellers to know about the benefits of the juice. The cost of the juice will be less in comparison to the other one. The gathering of the information will be beneficial for the health of the person. 

With all the things we know about it, smoking is definitely a stupid idea. For some reason though, a very large number of people still choose to smoke. Why do we do it? We all have our own reasons. Mine was accidental. I’ve got a pretty bad temper, and a friend told me that it would calm me down. That particular night, all I wanted was to relax and not feel like I could channel all the furies of Hell through my fist, so I took my first drag. Smokers remember that, and we all think about it for a moment as we light that wonderful, homicidal savior.

(You put the little paper savior to your lips, strike the lighter and hold it to the tip of your cigarette. As you inhale deeply, you close your eyes, basking in the feeling of bliss that the smoldering fire sends into your lungs and forgetting for the time being that the cigarette is like a fuse on your life. You roll the smoke around in your mouth, pull it the rest of the way into your lungs and hold your breath for a minute letting the feeling sink in. You exhale slowly, luxuriantly, watching the smoke crawl up your field of vision….)

Yeah, we all remember that feeling. Every once in a while, if we suffered enough since the last one, we still feel it. That’s why we refuse to quit – just like a junkie we’re chasing that high. As short lived as it is, it’s wonderful and it’ll kill us and we don’t care.

Or we do. Just not enough to give it up right now, because we’re still young. Big Tobacco relies on that. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the death of Big Tobacco screaming.

I quit smoking in 45 minutes, and I didn’t have to give up that little piece of bliss. The device that makes this possible is called an electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette. Usually, they look just like a cigarette, but if you look around you can get some options. Mine is all black and lights up red on the end. I also get to choose what I feel like tasting when I “smoke” – sitting on my desk are cartridges in flavors including tobacco, menthol, chocolate, cherry, and vanilla.

Being that I smoked full flavor cigarettes for the past 10 years, I chose the highest strength cartridge. My cartridges deliver 16mg of nicotine per cartridge, which is equal to about 20 cigarettes (theoretically. A cartridge actually lasts me about 2 days.) and is supposed to last about as long as one pack of cigarettes would typically last you. You can get cartridges for as cheap as $1 each, which means a “carton” worth of cartridges is $10. The cartridges I use contains propylene glycol, nicotine, lactic acid, flavorings and alcohol. Propylene glycol is used as a vapor delivery method, nicotine is obvious, lactic acid comes from milk, the flavorings produce the taste, and the alcohol content is negligible considering the amount of liquid actually in a cartridge. None of these has ever been linked to cancer, and probably none of them ever will. That’s a much shorter list than the list of chemical compounds in a cigarette, isn’t it?

The e-cigarette I use comes in 3 pieces: Battery (on the end is a light that looks like the glow from a cigarette. Attention getter. Seriously.), atomizer, and cartridge. You screw the atomizer into the fully charged battery, lock in a cartridge and you can go for hours, on that same cartridge. No ash, no smell, no smoke, no burning, no more ashtrays. (For you green freaks trying to reconcile smoking, check that part out. NO POLLUTION.)

Smoking bans do not apply to e-cigarettes, they apply to smoking. With an e-cigarette, you’re not lighting anything, there’s no pollution, and no odor, so you can “smoke” anywhere: airplanes, malls, grocery stores, bars and restaurants. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to enjoy that after dinner fix at the table again?

You can do your research, in fact, I recommend it. There are many options out there, and if you’d like to quit smoking, or just switch to a healthier alternative, I definitely recommend this.

Here’s the brand I use, as well as a competitor. You can check them both out and look around and do your research, but these are two of the best values in my opinion: Eluma is the brand that I use, and Blu is, in my opinion, the closest value in the competition.

Hope this helps you out, maybe even makes your transition to a tobacco free life easier.