First Post!!

My name is Jakk and I am soon to be an ex-smoker!


Thinking about how to start this blog, I came up with that sentence and all I could think about was an AA meeting. I picture a church basement, the scents of must and unidentifiable oldness mixing with the smells of fresh coffee and donuts. An old piano stands pushed against the back wall, with carts now mostly devoid of chairs pushed next to it. The chairs once in those carts are now arranged in front of a podium, carefully placed in between the support columns that rudely break up the space so that all can see. Brave souls of all genders, races, and ages sprinkle the chairs, getting ready to support one another as they ready themselves to spill the darkest secrets of their addictions. To my knowledge, however, there is no AA meeting for smokers. (Or maybe it is just too well hidden.) Perhaps if there were, it would add another level of ease when grappling with the monster that is quitting smoking. One could walk into that church basement and have a place to discuss things that their non-smoking friends can't ever fully understand and that their smoking friends aren't yet equipped to help them with. Yes, there are numerous hotlines to call and places to reach out to for assistance with quitting smoking, but there is nothing like a group of people dealing with similar issues to help with any kind of change of this nature!


So where does that leave me?


My name is Jakk and I am still smoking. I have been smoking for the past 12+ years, sometimes smoking a pack a day, sometimes cutting down to as little as 4 cigarettes a day. There are even a spattering of months here and there where I quit (mostly), but those periods never lasted. After all this time though, I'm through. I don't want to keep spending tons of money on my premature death! I decided to try to quit again, this time with the assistance of the LIVESTRONG MyQuit App for the iPhone.


At the time of this decision, I was smoking an average of 15 Parliament Menthol Light 100s a day. I set a quit date, and using the quitting plan that the app gave me, I was able to cut it down to about 12 cigarettes a day without any problems. Then I started cheating: I was allowing myself to not count my first cigarette of the day. I reasoned that I could still balance this out later. At least I was still smoking less, right? When I got down to 10 cigarettes a day, I really had a hard time. I didn't like the idea of being limited to any number or how quickly my plan had me cutting down; I pushed my quit date back so that I didn't have to cut back so quickly.


Now I was really starting to worry that this approach was not going to work. I wasn't even halfway through my quit plan and already I couldn't handle it. I was afraid that if I tried to quit smoking with just the app alone it would never work. Sure, there is a world of resources that I could have tapped into for help, but I was convinced that I was just not yet strong enough to kick this addiction completely. I was convinced that even if I could quit, it wouldn't last, just as before. I had to do something else, if only just for now. I really can't support my smoking habit and I am becoming more aware of the health risks I am taking each time I light up another cigarette. (I'm especially worried about accelerated aging and dental issues.) If I can't completely kick my nicotine addiction, I need another way to feed my body the substance it craves that is cheaper and possibly healthier...so why not Vaping?


Cost-wise, vaping is much cheaper then smoking by far. Here in NJ, the average price of a pack of cigarettes is roughly $9.00. Cartridges for e-cigarettes are generally around the same price, if not cheaper, but each cartridge usually has the nicotine equivalent of a pack of cigarettes; usually you can get 5 cartridges to a pack. That means that for each cigarette you smoke, it costs $0.45 while the e-cigarette equivalent is $0.09, for a total savings of $0.34 per cigarette. At my 15 cigarettes a day, that means a savings of $5.10 a day, or $1,861.50 a year! Even cheaper still is the liquid, or e-juice, for vapor pens and refillable cartridges.


If you buy a bottle of e-juice for a vapor pen of refillable cartridges, you can save even more! I'm seeing an average price so far that reflects a similarity to a pack of cigarettes, so for arguments sake, let's price a bottle at $9.00. The size of the bottle varies between brands, but the Eonsmoke brand seems to be the most commonly found bottle at brick and mortar stores, so we will use it for this example. These bottles come in 15ml sizes and advertise as containing the nicotine equivalent of 15 packs of cigarettes. That makes each pack of cigarettes less then $1.00! The e-juice equivalent to a single cigarette work out to cost $0.03, which is $0.06 cheaper then the cartridges for e-cigarettes and $0.42 cheaper then an "analog" cigarette. The e-juice gives me a savings of $8.55 a day! With my tight budget and the economy the way it is, this gives me a great advantage.


As far as vaping and health is concerned, the jury is still out. Vaping is too new for anyone to know exactly what it might be doing to your insides. The cartridges and e-juices are still as of yet unregulated (although after 7+ years of it being on the market, the first steps towards regulation are now just being made), so there are big variances of ingredients between manufacturers. It was even reported that some of the same ingredients in antifreeze were found in one manufacture's cartridges, though I have not seen anything stating what those ingredients were and what they might do. It seems to me that that story could just be anti-e-cigarette propaganda. Either way, I'm sure that sticking to well known, established brands could prevent things such as this. Also, I can list a whole list of things that cigarettes do to you that e-cigarettes do not, such as the lack of tar, the lack of smoke smell (on everything), there is the lack of many carcinogens found in smoke, I'm sure it can't be as bad for your teeth as smoking, etc. The bottom line is that I'm looking at it as even if vaping is found to really not be healthy for you, and I'm sure that there are ways that it is not, I'm convinced that it couldn't possibly be as bad for you as smoking. And there are at least 53 scientists that agree with me! (see here)


So here I am, making my journey from the world of smoking to the world of vaping. It's not my first time, as I did use e-cigarettes for a while before smoking again, really solely due to the fact that people around me were smoking. Even though my nicotine needs were being met, I still found myself craving cigarettes at times, and I would bum them from friends. Of course, a couple of puffs in I would realize that I really had no need for it and question just why in the world I thought I wanted it. I became convinced that there must be something else in cigarettes besides nicotine that is addictive! Although, I do smoke menthols and many studies have shown that menthols are harder to kick then non-menthols. Perhaps that is part of the reason?


That first time I started into vaping, I began with Logic disposables but soon switched to Eonsmoke as they were rechargeable and therefore cheaper. I had been obsessed with Eonsmoke's Mojito flavored cartridges for a few months, but it didn't last. Part of this was because the batteries for the Eonsmoke e-cigarette rarely lasted me a whole day and I had to always make sure I left the house with two fully charged batteries and a charger. I found that it was just not possible to carry just one as there was no warning that the battery was low and it would invariably die on me just as I was having a strong craving. That, and I had starting buying packs of cigarettes because I felt guilty bumming them from friends all the time. We had started hanging out at a local bar, which meant my cigarette cravings had gone up due to the alcohol involved, and I hated being "that guy".


This time around, I'm starting out with an Eonsmoke Vapor Pen. It was cheap enough and I was able to buy it at the same time as I bought my cigarettes, so it required very little effort on my part. I'm really enjoying it so far and am very happy that there are endless possibilities of flavors as they can be mixed since they are liquid. I'm now a week and a half in to owning my pen and am now down to 4 cigarettes a day. I have continued to follow the LIVESTRONG app, with my cigarettes slowly being replaced by the pen as each day goes by, and plan to see it through to the end to faze my body from getting nicotine from one form to the other. I'm hoping that the variety of e-juices and other available products combined with keeping this blog will help me to become and stay a vaper rather then a smoker. There is still a lot about vaping that I don't know, and I was confused about some terminology in the beginning, but simply reading the meaning of vaping Jargon here, I gained a much better understanding. Through this blog, I welcome you to join me on my journey as I delve into the world of Vaping, sharing information as I continue to expand my comprehension of it. I will write reviews as I try new products and I intend to follow and comment on news as the vaping industry continues to grow and starts to become regulated. I am going to make every attempt to post to this blog at least twice a week, with one of the posts being a review on whatever I am trying out next. I will also chronicle, through my reviews, places in Northern New Jersey where you can buy vaping products and at the best prices.


This is Jakk, part smoker, part vaper, signing off for now. Please be sure to read my next post, where I will talk more about my new Vapor Pen and provide my many musings about it!