Re: or short term quitting aid
I have friends who observe things too.
My first-person experience of vaping over the last seven years is this - I have the pleasure of working day in day out at many different large companies in a general quad between Birmingham, Norwich, Maidstone, Bristol and I rotate around them, never spend more than two days at each one. (31 companies currently, was 26 in 2009).
Each and every one of them does not allow vaping inside their buildings.
Six of them do not allow smoking or vaping on site (meaning people, including myself, stand on public space 1 inch away from the property boundary). The rest provide an area on-site like a bench, a 'bus stop' or in one case a (legally compliant) covered area with a bunch of sofas and a garden heater. (What is available seems to be completely proportional to how many senoir management smoke).
At time goes by there are more vapers, less smokers.
Almost but not quite all of them are people who used to smoke or are new to the companies, but very rarely do I come across someone who didnt smoke before but thought vaping would be a good thing to try. For those that have done so, sometimes I don't see them for months at a time because they seem to stop and start at will. This supports one theory that nicotine is not as addictive on its own as we are told, but it's the 1.5k other chemicals in a cigarette that potentiate it. That's a whole theory on its own and there is plenty of reading on that subject elsewhere. I can only report that this is what I hgave witnessed.
The subject of how many people we see vaping is one of the many things discussed in these areas. Most smokers and vapers I have spoken to seem to think that smoking is not noticed much because cigarettes have been normalised for many years and most traditional cigs are one of three general shapes which the mind just ignores, so people just dont notice it. But with vaping each device looks different so the brain takes more notice of it. That's all I believe it is.
But on average, in every single one of them there are no more or less people present in the smoking area than there were years ago when vaping was a new thing.
I don't recall ever having a conversation with people about how they use their cigarettes, where they get them from, the best way to hold them / light them etc, but with vapers it's all we talk about out there now. What batteries / flavour etc, where to get juices from, build or buy coils / how to wick etc. It's all part of the social aspect of vaping, the smoking areas have turned into a kind of vaping club rather than a bunch of smelly miserable souls staring at the ground.
Even if vaping did have the same health concerns as smoking, surely something that makes people more socially interactive is a good thing? It seems to work in my experience.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
