Combine with a dopamine booster for the first weeks (or masturbate a lot) and quitting suddenly feels easy.

I bought it online but directly from a Polish or Slovakian pharmacy.

May I ask: The side effects listed under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varenicline#Side_effects

-> how hard did any of these hit you in your time?

Not available in the US. I quit smoking 8 years ago but can't wean myself off of vaping. Not that I really tried though and I can easily do a transatlantic flight. The problem with vapes is that they become 24x7 pacifiers, my nicotine intake must be a lot higher.

For the first year I wanted a cigarette every fucking day.

Years later, I still had dreams where I would light up…

20+ years on, a distant memory.

- stop smoking in certain situations (no cigarette at the bus stop, no cigarette after lunch, …)

- allow myself to put out a cigarette halfway when I’m smoking. I lapsed and lit one, but that doesn’t mean I have to finish it.

- try to feel the downsides of the cigarette while smoking. The nicotine high mostly overrides this, but it’s possible to concentrate on the yucky feeling in your mouth, your lungs being burned etc.

- telling myself that I am sure I want to stop smoking at some point in my life so I might as well stop now.

It has been way more than four years for me, and I'll smell some cigarette smoke when I'm in a mood and be all like "Man, wouldn't it be nice if I got me one of those?".

But, I can say the same sort of thing about my reaction to the odor of coffee or caffeinated tea. Despite the fact that the very same place I get my coffee and tea from sells cigarettes -and wouldn't even card me because I'm so very obviously old- I've been able to quit nicotine. I've never been able to quit caffeine.

That eventually faded after our careers took us in different directions, and landing remote roles or at places with fewer or no smokers.

I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to quit. Props to anyone who makes the attempt, successfully or otherwise.

The first attempt, quite early on, I hadn't realised how dependent I'd become and thought it would be easy. Sure, I enjoyed vaping, but I didn't "have" to do it. Give it a couple days and I'll be back to normal. Predictably that went poorly.

Various other attempts I'd now look back on as thinking I could outsmart addiction and try to ease out of it, when in reality it was little more than procrastination.

Oh, I'll start to limit the times I vape. Only between certain hours. Or I'll go outside and do it, make it inconvenient and less appealing. I'll buy flavours I don't enjoy as much and change the association.

For me the only way to stop was to accept the unpleasantness of going cold-turkey. I knew going in that the first 48-72 hours would be brutal but that it would get significantly easier afterwards. There's always a reason to delay but everything I attempted short of actually stopping feels like self-deception.

Vaping can be difficult to stop because:

- it's more accepted

- it's smoother on the throat, and there's plenty of tastes.

- there is no "dose", if you want to you can just vape non stop, and you can pace yourself. With a cigarette, you can't smoke slowly, or you'll loose half the cigarette.

All in all, it's just more convenient and cheaper to vape. If you're hooked, I can see it quite a challenge to stop. You can always say : "oh I am just taking x drags a day".

Personnally I didn't like vaping much, cause it was the beginning, the tastes were weird, the gear was not great battery-wise. So I kept going back to smoking. Eventually going cold turkey from cigarettes was way easier than through vaping.

>Most people [...] need about an hour break in between smokes.

I've never seen anything like that. When there's a group of social smokers standing around, it's very common for something like "Oh, I just finished mine and you're only half-way through yours, I'll light up another one to keep you company" to happen. I've seen plenty of people who aren't chain smokers (yet), but can easily go through 2-4 cigarettes in a row if they're suddenly in a stressful situation and smoking "to relax".

>So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.

But that's not a metric that's in any way helpful for a health decision. Nicotine in and of itself is not particularly physically harmful - it's toxic at high doses and elevates heart rate for a bit, but that's about it. The delivery method is what causes most of the harm, and smoking is 100% known to cause a lot of harm in a lot of different ways. And "With vaping that limit is completely gone" is also not accurate. Unlike the Navier-Stokes equations, dopamine receptors don't experience infinite blowup in finite time. So choosing a delivery method based on the amount of nicotine taken daily is not going to change much in terms of addiction (if you're already heavily addicted, you'll remain heavily addicted), but can have a huge impact on physical health.

Also, I'm dubious about your claim that most people need breaks, or at least any more than vapers do. I was a smoker for over a decade. I don't remember ever feeling like "that's enough, my throat hurts". It's just that smoking was triggered by the onset of withdrawal, which begins after about an hour, and becomes urgent after maybe 2-3 hours. So I'd typically smoke at an interval of 1-3 hours depending on how convenient it was to do so. And cigarettes are expensive, so that factors into it too.

Sometimes though, especially when drinking, I could chain smoke for a couple hours straight while hanging out in a park with friends, especially in the summer.

After I switched to vaping though, I have at times ended up puffing so enthusiastically that I've made myself nauseous from the nicotine. So there's certainly a limit there too.

Edit: another interesting thing I've noticed. Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping. It takes several hours longer to become noticeable, and also feels less intense. When smoking, it took me 1 hour to start craving a cigarette, by 3 hours I'm becoming irritable with strong craving, and by 5 hours I'm extremely irritable, light-headed, and the only thing on my mind is smoking, completely incapable of focusing on anything except how to get some cigarettes and how to get to somewhere I can smoke em.

For vaping, it takes me maybe 7-8 hours to get to the 3 hour mark for smoking. I certainly get cravings long before that, maybe starting at 2-3 hours, but I'm able to push it out of my mind much more easily, for much longer. I don't know why this is. My theory is something to do with the lack of MAO inhibitors. It's also possible that it's a pharmacokinetic phenomenon, but that seems counterintuitive. If I'm ingesting higher doses of nicotine compared to smoking, blood levels will take longer to go to zero. But then I should also have higher tolerance, and therefore a higher threshold for the onset of withdrawal, since tolerance and chemical dependence are more or less the same thing.

However, the vast majority of my nicotine usage after quitting was chewing nicotine gum -- for 11 years! It also has the qualities you mention. You can be chewing all the time, anywhere, everywhere, and without any of the vaping restrictions places have.

Nicotine gum isn't for everyone, but if you're one of the people for whom it really takes as an addiction of its own, it's that much more difficult to quit because it's discreet, there's essentially no stigma, and you can do chew absolutely anywhere, doing practically anything.

In my experience: no, you don't. You just arrange your life around the fact that you need to smoke all the time.

The patches are different, not just because it lacks that same connection to compulsive and ritualistic activity, but it simply doesn't provide the same quick "hit" that makes smoking far more addictive.

On the other hand, someone prone to addictive tendencies probably shouldn't even use the patches. Even the patches can be a gateway to vaping and smoking for such a person. I have simply never been the type to become addicted to any drug or substance, other than the occasional overeating. This isn't to say that I don't have the potential to get hooked on more powerful drugs, but my innate desire to use them is a lot less than I think is average. Even during times where I've habitually drunk copious amounts of alcohol, I've always been able to realize "this kinda sucks so I think I'm gonna stop" and then I just do without really much struggle other than some brain fog for a few days. Similarly, I sometimes use phenibut, and people talk about how easy it is to become dependent on it and how hard it is to get off it, and that hasn't been my experience in the slightest. Someone without a clear objective around how they use substances like that will be much more likely to end up suffering.

That said, the patches are great for focus and anxiety when used in low doses in moderation. I don't necessarily advise that everyone use them as I have, but I also don't think they're anywhere near as harmful as one might assume. I don't feel the need to ever switch to smoking or vapes, or even gums and pouches.

I’m ADHD boy for sure, and my dad and his younger sister are both very much not like my aunt, who is more like me. Shes in her 80s now, and was the only smoker - literally smoked cartons a week for about as long as I remember.