I decided to write this blog post about my personal experience with smoking, tobacco, and the electronic cigarette.  I have been using and selling electronic cigarettes since 2007 and started smoking in about 1992.

In 2007 I was a pack a day smoker.  I found the e-cigarette and thought it would be a perfect way to quit smoking.  For me, that was not the case.  I did like using my electronic cigarette, but I was still smoking tobacco cigarettes.  On the days when I used my e-cigarette religiously, I did smoke less, but couldn’t give it up completely.  It was a start, but I still wanted to quit smoking completely.

I tried the nicotine gum.  It was very expensive and didn’t help me at all.  I am not a gum chewer to begin with, which may have had something to do with my it.  I tried the patch.  Same result.  At that point I was less confident that I would ever quit smoking and resided to the fact that I would just continue to supplement my smoking with my electronic cigarette.  After all, half a pack of cigarettes per day is better than a full pack….right?

During my earlier years and right up until recently I mistakenly believed that other tobacco products such as snus were as dangerous as smoking.  All of the propaganda by the pharmaceutical companies trying to sell me “quit smoking aids” had me convinced me that using smokeless tobacco was just as bad as cigarettes.  Of course over the last couple of years the e-cigarette industry has been the target of the same propaganda.  This woke me up to the possibility that the phrase “smokeless tobacco is not a safe alternative to tobacco cigarettes” may be misleading.

I am under no false perceptions…..using snus is not safe….but is safer.  I say this because of the research I began to do on snus.  What I found was that makers of snus where required to put warnings on their product that included “this product can cause mouth cancer”.  But my research revealed that there are no studies showing that snus can cause mouth cancer.  And there are some massive studies to refer to.  In fact one used 279,897 people over a 14 year period with a follow up 12 years later (in 2004).  This study, as mentioned in an earlier blog post about FDA regulation, showed that snus did not increase the risk of getting mouth cancer.

This gave me a new perspective about tobacco in general.  And along with other studies regarding just nicotine it gave me the motivation to give snus a try.  That did it!  I quit smoking cigarettes by switching to snus.  I still use my electronic cigarette with my snus.  I like blowing out clouds of vapor.  I like blowing vapor rings.  I like the action of smoking.  So I went from smoking a lot to smoking some while using my e-cigarette to smoking none.  I feel good both physically and mentally for quitting smoking.

I can’t say exactly why I fully quit smoking using snus and not the e-cigarette.  It may have not been enough nicotine.  It may have been something else in the tobacco I was missing.  But whatever the reason, I now snus and vape instead of smoking.

I write this blog post because contrary to the pharmaceutical companies, the FDA, and the various public health organizations that are funded by pharmaceutical profits, quitting smoking is more important than who profits from it.

Here are a few words of advice: don’t inhale anything that burns, don’t give up on quitting smoking, and rethink what you think you know about smoking, tobacco, and nicotine.