Have you stopped smoking really?

To me is sounds like someone saying "I don't smoke any more, I just use cigars instead".

As in "no longer inhaling combustion products", certainly. I'll admit it's still a damned silly thing to do... unless it's compared to sticking dead plant matter into your face-hole and setting fire to it.

I started smoking at age eleven (it was perfectly legal, and I'd been buying cigarettes legally for more than half of my life by that point - it was as much a normal part of an errand as picking up a quart of milk or a loaf of bread), and can't say I put a lot of consideration into it at the time. Over then next four and a half decades, I tried quitting, unsuccessfully, dozens of times. Vaping means I haven't been inhaling burning plant matter for years. I'm happy with the harm reduction. The "quit or die" attitude is what needs to die.

I completely respect your rights to smoke whatever you feel like, and your wish for a better healthier way of doing it, or hell even suing the people who targeted you at 11, but my issue is that it hasn't been proved to my satisfaction that vaping is healthier than cigarettes.

The history of smoking is one of killing people more efficiently, ecigs feel like a continuation of that great tradition.

Are you seriously suggesting that the removal of basically every compound in tobacco found to be cancer causing and the addition of ones with a much lower likelihood of harm that have already been in use for well over a decade is going to be more dangerous?

With the exception of certain nasty flavoring agents and such, I think this is quite unlikely. There's certainly no evidence to support it.

Were they so harmless proof they they are shouldn't be hard to find. The studies I have looked at point an ambivalent picture. Unlike the case for marijuana which seems to not cause any lung cancers contrary to people looking for a link for 50 years now.

There is a fairly big practical difference between cigars and cigarettes. Cigars (like pipes) aren't traditionally inhaled into the lungs, so if you have genuinely gone from cigarettes to cigars and you aren't inhaling you're probably a lot better off.

It is a misconception that cigars are better than cigarettes. One cigar contains as much tobacco as 15-20 cigarettes and although you are not using lungs to breakdown and absorb smoke, you are using your mouth lining which can lead to all sorts of mouth cancers.

Yeah and your statistics are also misleading because who the hell smokes a full cigar in a sitting?

Most people actually. Most people who light a cigar will finish the entire thing.

In my experience most people will smoke a 1/3 or 1/2 of it and put it back. Then you clip the burnt part off and continue later. Maybe I only smoke around lightweights.

That's very much the exception than the rule, I've smoked cigars for 5 years at this point and nobody I know who also smokes does that. Usually I pencil in between 45 minutes-2 hours to smoke a cigar depending on size.

That's not my experience. Relighting a cigar tastes awful, and half-smoking it can dry out the other half. Most folks smoke at least one full cigar in a single sitting.

I used vaping to quit smoking. Then I quit vaping, and found quitting vaping easier than quitting smoking. Now I just breathe deep when I feel like taking a hit from something. The feeling of filling my lungs with some bulls--it is what is missed most, I notice.

Quiting vaping is quite likely to be easier for actual chemical reasons - Tobacco contains not only nicotine but an MAOI which seems to add quite a bit to it's addictive effects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16177026

Have you tried tapering the nicotine levels from vaping? Asking for myself..

I did.

I went from pack-a-day Newports to Vaping at 36mg/ml. Within a week I was down to 18mg/ml. Within a year I tapered all the way down to under 3mg/ml (I mixed all my own juices).

I stayed right around 3mg/ml for about a year, then I moved jobs and could no longer vape in my office. It seemed quite pointless to go outside and vape since I didnt really have the urge, I was still vaping in the evening after work for another 2-3 months. I finally reached the point where the trouble was more than it was worth, and just stopped entirely.

So yes, I'm a big fan of vaping. Is it "safe?" Probably not. Is it less harmful than cigarettes? I dont think that is even in question, at all. Vaping is, at worst, a significant harm reduction for smokers and those around them. At best, it is a method of quitting cigarettes and have proven successful for MANY former smokers.

I really hate the direction things are going with regulation, because to me it looks a lot like PM and friends are using regulatory capture to ban everything but menthol vapes that they can afford to get tested, thus perpetuating their existence and granting them a lock on the market.

I started with 25mg years ago (hard switch in April 2012 from a pack a day) and nowadays I happily vape at 3mg