Why I Quit Vaping

The clock read 4:15 am and apparently I had awoken from my slumber to suck on my Juul vape pen like Chris Rock sucking the glass dick (a crack pipe) in the movie New Jack City. That movie is over 30 years old but I can’t come up with a better analogy for how it felt to be hooked to my vape at that moment.

It wasn’t all bad

It wasn’t always like this though, in the beginning switching from combustible tobacco to vaping felt like a watershed moment, it was the beginning of a golden age of tobacco consumption. It felt like I’d entered a special club as the velvet ropes magically parted and champagne poured down from the heavens.

You see by then, I had spent years “quitting smoking,” even becoming a competitive triathlete thinking that would help me to quit, but it turned out I could still sneak those filthy cigs any chance I had and not notice any impact on my racing. I was destined to stay a smoker, or so I told myself.

I was trying to quit for all the wrong reasons, and worst of all, I didn't really want to quit, it wasn’t having any negative impact that I could notice. Hell I was doing triathlons, half marathons, and obstacle course races, even finishing a 5k in under 21 minutes while still smoking, and that’s pretty fast.

I had no interest or real incentive to quit.

“Quitting smoking” for all the wrong reasons

Throughout my marriage I smoked on and off, hiding it from my kids, sometimes my wife, although she had begun smoking again when we started dating. I was never really free of the habit, no matter how much I kid myself.

Any excuse I could come up with to smoke I took, I would find myself leaving the house more and even being more socially active in the likelihood I would run into someone smoking and I could bum a smoke.

By then I had tried numerous ways of quitting smoking from various NRT’s (nicotine replacement therapy) like the patch and nicotine gum, to taking Chantix. Now Chantix actually made it fairly easy to quit, but it came with terrifying nightmares and suicidal ideations, so it kind of had its downsides.

Apparently, last year Pfizer even stopped producing Chantix because it too was causing cancer. It seemed that I was destined to be a quitter all my life.

Then came the divorce

No, the smoking certainly wasn’t the cause of my divorce, but it did act as a pretty good analgesic.

Now, I no longer needed to quit for my wife or my kids, lord knows I hadn’t been trying to quit for myself, so the divorce just became a great excuse to pick the habit up again full bore.

All those years trying to hide my smoking from family, friends, my kids, was all a big ruse. The person judging me the most for smoking was always me, it also happened to be the only person that mattered.

When I snuck a smoke so no one would know, I would know, and it would destroy my self-esteem and my confidence. This part hadn’t dawned on me by then, it’s something that came to me much later on after some deep soul searching and introspection.

That being said, one thing was for sure, I couldn’t hide my addiction from myself.

In comes Juul

Prior to Juul, I had tried a number of different vaping options and I found most of them to be somewhere between disgusting and downright awful — and none of them stuck. I also had no interest in getting one of those big vaping rigs that had become popular at the time, blowing giant clouds of smoke at passersby.

I was trying to get off a habit that was detrimental and not Super-Size a new habit with bigger smoke and fruitier flavors to enhance my experience. I wasn’t trying to ‘Make Smoking Great Again,’ I was trying to put it in my rear view mirror for God’s sake.

The Juul technology truly revolutionized vaping, they made a smooth package, with a cool magnetic USB charging dock. It was sleek, sexy, and the sweetest puff of vaporized nicotine I had ever experienced.

They even created a portable self-contained charging pack for power users so you could always keep a spare on deck. Any self-respecting Juul or vape user alwasy had backups.

The golden days of vaping

The early days were truly golden, there was no awful smell either from my clothing, my breath, or the ambient air. I no longer had to go outside to get my smoking fix or even open the window in the car when it was raining and risk getting wet.

I would be able to puff on it in the airport (not legally, but certainly undetected) as opposed to waiting outside the terminal chain smoking cigarettes until there was no spare time left to get through security and boarding my flight. The last thing you wanted to do as a smoker was try to run for a plane after smoking 5 cigarettes in a row.

Hell, I would even hit my Juul while sitting on the plane waiting to take off and just blow the vapor into the matching AC vapor running up the sides, or just blow it discretely into my shirt.

During the flight I would smoke the vape in the bathroom as it was vapor and essentially undetectable. Today they say its illegal to vape anywhere in the airport terminal but i’ve never seen or heard of anyone getting in trouble vaping in the airport.

This was truly a disruptive technology in every sense of the term. Juul had even beat Facebook to becoming the fastest decacorn (a startup valued at $10B or more) in history. It took only 7 months compared to Facebook’s 2.5 years.

Entitled AF

The honeymoon period was amazing, I no longer even marked myself a smoker on dating apps as I didnt consider myself one. I mean sure I still had nicotine in my blood, but as a biohacker I could justify it as nicotine has health benefits, like releasing BDNF for one(brain derived neurotropic factor) and potentially helping to prevent against various neurodegenerative diseases.

Much of this research is still ongoing, but tobacco has had medicinal uses and been used by various cultures for thousands of years now, I had all the excuses working in my favor.

It truly was the golden days of vaping, I’d even look down on people who still smoked cigarettes because I thought I was better than them, funny what the ego can do.

Well the golden days started coming to a quick end as I found myself vaping more frequently than I smoked, half my day I would just be clutching the vape in my hand like a pacifier, and if I couldn’t find my vape, I would totally lose my shit.

I recall one instance in the middle of the night when I couldn’t find my Juul, so I went to a 7–11 to buy a new one. Well, they didn’t have starter packs, or devices, and I totally blew a fuse yelling at the employees in the store as if it was somehow their fault. Afterwards I tore through my car looking for my vape until I eventually surrendered to the situation and just decided to drive home and deal with it then. Shit, I didnt even want to buy cigarettes to get my fix, ‘I wanted my god damned binkie… I mean vape.’

Upon calming down, the Juul miraculously appeared in my pocket, where it had been the whole time.

I’m sure there were other outbursts, but by then I started carrying multiple, just to spare any innocent convenience store workers from my vape deprived rage.

The day the music stopped

As I began to notice my abuse of the vape, and my increasing dependence on it, I also noticed how pervasive this convenient little device had become. Normally I would smoke a cigarette and then go to the bathroom for my morning constitutional, but now, I could just puff away on my vape while sitting on the toilet, I mean thats some next-level efficiency right there.

I no longer needed to take smoke breaks while working and could just puff on it all day, it had dissolved all boundaries and restrictions, it had become so frictionless that I could do it anywhere and anytime. It didn’t make it hard for me to play sports, I was never out of breath, and I couldn’t notice any of the detrimental effects of the drug. Not only was it frictionless but its impact was invisible, or at least so I thought.

A few months before the Corona Virus pandemic, there was another epidemic in the US. A wave of vape users were being admitted to hospitals across Americe having contracted a severe lung illness affectionally termed EVALI (E-cigarette or Vaping Use-Associated Lung Injury)

By January 2020 there were over 2700 hospitalizations and 61 deaths that were directly tied to vaping.

This certainly gave me pause, but it wasn’t the thing that put me over the top. I mean, ‘yeah people were getting sick, but they were probably weak and I was better than them somehow, I mean it probably won’t happen to me, right.’

Then came a show on Amazon Prime called “Uploads.” It was based in the year 2033, and the premise was that people could upload their consciousness before they die and continue to live on digitally and even maintaining contact with their still-living loved ones. It was kind of like “The Office” meets “Black Mirror.”

Well in this not so dystopian future the hospital had a few wings, one of them was dedicated to new Uploads, like the title of the show, and the other, bigger wing of the hospital was dedicated to vape lung.

That vape lung episode coupled with my sleep vaping came to be my canary in the coal mine moment.

I decided then and there that I could no longer go on vaping, and I would even prefer to return to regular combustible tobacco than to continue vaping at this point. If I recall correctly it was sometime in mid-may 2020 when I made that decision.

Next I needed to formulate a plan to rid myself of the vaping habit.

Spoiler alert, a lot psychedelic mushrooms were involved, but that is for the next part of the story, I will likely call it “How I Quit Vaping.”

This story will have at least 1 to 2 more parts. I intend to discuss my next steps, including my heroic dose of psychedelic mushrooms in a dark room by myself in the middle of a pandemic. I also plan to talk about my other exploration of medicinal tobacco and the various forms of this once sacred and respected plant medicine.

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