A while back I saw this on reddit... in case you don't want to click the link, it's a picture of a cigarette with the caption "This plant-based alternative promises to help high schoolers stop vaping".
I would have never thought that people would be stupid enough to try this for real, but here we are...
You're being judgmental but I think you're just misinformed.
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.
In early 2025, a Dutch newspaper was also writing about young adults struggling with vaping addiction, and how some switch to smoking as a better alternative.
For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches and they’ve been great, cheap, and legal in the country I live in now.
Recently I got the urge to try vaping again, bought all the paraphernalia and started vaping like a chimney 24/7. Got light nicotine poisoning as well. After two days, I caught myself compulsively reaching for the vape.
So I threw everything away and I’m back to patches. Took me a week to forget the compulsive hand-to-mouth urge. I now believe intradermal nicotine is the superior method of administration. At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
> At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
In my experience: no, you don't. You just arrange your life around the fact that you need to smoke all the time.
John Wayne is said to have chain-smoked 5-7 packs a day? If you can smoke a cigarette every ~30 mins, that's 2/hour (actually about 1.5 packs/day), but if a cigarette takes 10 minutes to smoke and you chain-smoke, that's 6/hour (4.5 packs/day). So it's doable but John Wayne was significantly out of breath the last 10+ years of his life, perhaps from having an entire lung removed.
A lifelong chain smoker will smoke a cigarette in 1-2 minutes and light up another. 3-5 minutes is a relaxed casual smoke. Cigarettes were modified a decade or so ago to ensure that they go out quickly if not actively smoked. It's not even possible anymore to keep a cigarette burning for long enough for it to take 10 minutes.
This is all pedantic. The point is that you can chain smoke quite a lot if you're dedicated. I've never met anyone who smoked more than two packs a day regularly or maybe three on a crazy night out of drinking and smoking. 4-5 is crazy.
Lucille Ball's voice changed dramatically over the course of the 6yr show from heavy smoking. Their show was sponsored by cigarette companies and she used to hand out cigarettes on a platter to guest when they came over to her house.
I don't know how they did it but 50 years ago some people did seem to smoke non-stop. Of course they were still an exception.
Of course when they cigarettes were dirt cheap you could let atleast a few burn up with just a puff or two off it also. These days they are so expensive from taxes that setting it down and breathing for a second instead of smoking can feel like burning money.
Hey, another person with addiction-intolerant ADHD! I have run into so few people who encountered and noted it. Most people can’t just treat a compulsion by curtailing it through willpower, though I still don’t comprehend why. Ironic that the willpower disorder wins the day versus the baseline.
>For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches
My first thought was "That's a no brainer why didn't I think of that".
Then I remembered that I grew up during peak anti-smoking and so they made nicotine out to be some sort of borderline meth boogeyman rather than just extra addictive extra effective caffeine that comes in bad for your health form factors and that all that propaganda got sent straight to long term memory and I was indoctrinated by it at such a young age it didn't even occur to me to think outside the box like that.
Nicotine patches are expensive for what they are but they're basically free compared to meds.
It's two very touchy subjects: nicotine and ADHD. I'm not fond to talk about it because misinformation and ignorance is just rampant. Nicotine has indeed been turned into the boogeyman.
Anyway, I told my psych about my plan, and he agreed there is research indicating nicotine works as a third-line stimulant medication for ADHD. In many modern, Western countries adult ADHD is not even recognized, let alone medicated, so one has to make do with what's available.
In my experience it is almost as effective as amphetamines, with fewer side effects, much longer lasting (a patch lasts 16+ hours), and very cheap - if you get them on ebay from China. Addiction potential is null: addiction is a function of how quickly the effect peaks, and it takes 3 hours. Not even lisdexamfetamine can compare with how unaddictive patches are.
That said, if I had access to prescription amphetamines, I'd go back to them, but I sure don't miss the days all it did was making me incredibly horny and focused scrolling social media all day long. It was a little too effective at keeping me engaged for my own good, so using a subpar medication means learning to live with ADHD, adjusting your life around your own quirk, rather than only relying on the medication to fix everything for you.
Try pipe tobacco in a corncob (beginner level, easy/forgiving) or briar (more advanced, takes packing & coal management technique) pipe. Way less costly than cigarettes, in more ways than the wallet!
I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely uncommon in Norway (and probably also Sweden) to quit cigarettes by switching to snus (tobacco between your lip/gum).
The only way I could quit my nicotine addiction was to slowly reduce the amount of nicotine in my vape juice. Even at 0% nicotine and no more physical dependence it still took a whole year to finally stop vaping. If I had a single cigarette I would have to start the whole process over again. Nicotine addiction is a terrible enslavement.
Which is why it is BS that many places have marketted and regulated away fillable vapes and buying your own juice. Most vapes available now are disposables and have one and only one concentration level available.
I am more of a cigar smoker, I used to smoke a cigar every month, every other month and sometimes all month long for several months, but I was never addicted, I have gone a year or two without cigars, currently I have not had one in about five years now, give or take. I could have one any moment, they sit in my humidor, but I did try ecigs for a little bit. I'd love to have an alternative that doesn't compromise my health, but until then I'll keep my cigars.
I love cigars for various reasons, but there's no true alternative that's worth while.
To be clear, it's 100%, definitely not good for you - but the level of harm doesn't seem to be even close to cigarettes or chewing tobacco.
The amount consumed is much less, the smoke shouldn't be entering your lungs, and if there are tons of good, "all-natural" tobacco out there without all the additives put in by cigarette companies.
Literally the worst idea. I quit vaping a while ago. Vaping made me, it gave me dopamine hits even when I got nothing done. Quitting has made me noticeably more focused, alert and let's me push myself harder. That feels great to me.
I've heard that you can get a "0%" vape that has no nicotine in it, but the vape shops I've asked have no idea what I'm talking about or why I'd want it. Any idea if that's real?
Yes this is and has always been an option. Find any real vape shop at any point in the past... _checks calendar_ 15 years at least, and they will sell you nearly any of their "e-juice" products with no nicotine.
Trick is, the companies making disposables vapes/pods/etc generally don't offer them because those are generally large tobacco and other companies and ... well, why would they manufacturer and sell a non-addictive cigarette when an addictive version exists.
0% nicotine was an option almost 20 years ago when I started vaping and is still available. The tobacco companies getting involved and polluting the streets with single use lithium ion batteries and shit have done nothing but made everything worse.
Yep, it exists. I tried it before, and it still felt as bad because of the smoke you're inhaling. Our lungs are extremely sensitive receptors and are pretty much supposed to interact with absolutely nothing else other than the air we breathe.
It's useful for quitting. A lot of smokers/vapers struggle with "oral fixation", ie needing something to do with their mouth. Gradually lowering your nicotine to 0% is a way to get off nicotine without having to face this problem at the same time.
i know this sounds dumb on the surface, but assuming you have other restrictions in your life it works.
Vaping tastes great, can be done indoors, doesn’t need an ash tray, and others around you are mildly annoyed vs visibly upset. Cigarettes are the direct opposite of all of those. The added friction could put someone over the hump.
The next will be nicotine free tobacco. .. the leafs will be watered for a undisclosed amount of time to remove the nicotine as it's water soluble. It's like decaffeinated coffee - it's when you need this tastes but your heart can't take it anymore :)
If you can also keep the usual tobacco-processing chemicals and other additives out, is the bare leaf, nicotine-free, arguably no worse than other common vices ?
Generally I would say that burning(flame/smoldering) anything is bad for you. Even simplest hydrocarbons (methane, propane, butane) with imperfect combustion have negative effects. You can make it slightly better, but smoke is most likely always carcinogenic.
BS, fake news, and dumb. Did a handful of humans actually post about this? I'm sure, and probably tried it for a day. But "people," as in a group of people large enough to be remotely news worthy? No. This is just bait. Also not hacker news.
A while back I saw this on reddit... in case you don't want to click the link, it's a picture of a cigarette with the caption "This plant-based alternative promises to help high schoolers stop vaping".
I would have never thought that people would be stupid enough to try this for real, but here we are...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
I am reminded of: https://theonion.com/new-smokable-nicotine-sticks-can-they-h...
You're being judgmental but I think you're just misinformed.
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.
In early 2025, a Dutch newspaper was also writing about young adults struggling with vaping addiction, and how some switch to smoking as a better alternative.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/volkskrant-magazine/als-deze-moede... (https://archive.ph/O7dpL)
For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches and they’ve been great, cheap, and legal in the country I live in now.
Recently I got the urge to try vaping again, bought all the paraphernalia and started vaping like a chimney 24/7. Got light nicotine poisoning as well. After two days, I caught myself compulsively reaching for the vape.
So I threw everything away and I’m back to patches. Took me a week to forget the compulsive hand-to-mouth urge. I now believe intradermal nicotine is the superior method of administration. At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
> At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.
In my experience: no, you don't. You just arrange your life around the fact that you need to smoke all the time.
I've been a heavy cigarette smoker for 12 years (pack a day min.). When I switched to vaping, I vaped continuously the entire day.
There is no human on earth that can smoke continuously the entire day for very long. A pack a day smoker means smoking one every ~30 minutes circa.
John Wayne is said to have chain-smoked 5-7 packs a day? If you can smoke a cigarette every ~30 mins, that's 2/hour (actually about 1.5 packs/day), but if a cigarette takes 10 minutes to smoke and you chain-smoke, that's 6/hour (4.5 packs/day). So it's doable but John Wayne was significantly out of breath the last 10+ years of his life, perhaps from having an entire lung removed.
A lifelong chain smoker will smoke a cigarette in 1-2 minutes and light up another. 3-5 minutes is a relaxed casual smoke. Cigarettes were modified a decade or so ago to ensure that they go out quickly if not actively smoked. It's not even possible anymore to keep a cigarette burning for long enough for it to take 10 minutes.
This is all pedantic. The point is that you can chain smoke quite a lot if you're dedicated. I've never met anyone who smoked more than two packs a day regularly or maybe three on a crazy night out of drinking and smoking. 4-5 is crazy.
Lucille Ball's voice changed dramatically over the course of the 6yr show from heavy smoking. Their show was sponsored by cigarette companies and she used to hand out cigarettes on a platter to guest when they came over to her house.
I don't know how they did it but 50 years ago some people did seem to smoke non-stop. Of course they were still an exception. Of course when they cigarettes were dirt cheap you could let atleast a few burn up with just a puff or two off it also. These days they are so expensive from taxes that setting it down and breathing for a second instead of smoking can feel like burning money.
it also stops being unpleasant once your brain has associated it deeply with the dopamine
if anything, the strong smell and taste sensations makes it even more addictive
Hey, another person with addiction-intolerant ADHD! I have run into so few people who encountered and noted it. Most people can’t just treat a compulsion by curtailing it through willpower, though I still don’t comprehend why. Ironic that the willpower disorder wins the day versus the baseline.
I smoked my first cigarette at 6, really started at 13 and smoked 2 packs a day for 30 years. Patches are the best way.
>For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches
My first thought was "That's a no brainer why didn't I think of that".
Then I remembered that I grew up during peak anti-smoking and so they made nicotine out to be some sort of borderline meth boogeyman rather than just extra addictive extra effective caffeine that comes in bad for your health form factors and that all that propaganda got sent straight to long term memory and I was indoctrinated by it at such a young age it didn't even occur to me to think outside the box like that.
Nicotine patches are expensive for what they are but they're basically free compared to meds.
It's two very touchy subjects: nicotine and ADHD. I'm not fond to talk about it because misinformation and ignorance is just rampant. Nicotine has indeed been turned into the boogeyman.
Anyway, I told my psych about my plan, and he agreed there is research indicating nicotine works as a third-line stimulant medication for ADHD. In many modern, Western countries adult ADHD is not even recognized, let alone medicated, so one has to make do with what's available.
In my experience it is almost as effective as amphetamines, with fewer side effects, much longer lasting (a patch lasts 16+ hours), and very cheap - if you get them on ebay from China. Addiction potential is null: addiction is a function of how quickly the effect peaks, and it takes 3 hours. Not even lisdexamfetamine can compare with how unaddictive patches are.
That said, if I had access to prescription amphetamines, I'd go back to them, but I sure don't miss the days all it did was making me incredibly horny and focused scrolling social media all day long. It was a little too effective at keeping me engaged for my own good, so using a subpar medication means learning to live with ADHD, adjusting your life around your own quirk, rather than only relying on the medication to fix everything for you.
as a medication alternative there's saffron, which also helps (not as good)
Did you read gwerns post on it by any chance?
https://gwern.net/nicotine
Isn't that way shorter acting ?
What is?
Try pipe tobacco in a corncob (beginner level, easy/forgiving) or briar (more advanced, takes packing & coal management technique) pipe. Way less costly than cigarettes, in more ways than the wallet!
I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely uncommon in Norway (and probably also Sweden) to quit cigarettes by switching to snus (tobacco between your lip/gum).
The only way I could quit my nicotine addiction was to slowly reduce the amount of nicotine in my vape juice. Even at 0% nicotine and no more physical dependence it still took a whole year to finally stop vaping. If I had a single cigarette I would have to start the whole process over again. Nicotine addiction is a terrible enslavement.
Which is why it is BS that many places have marketted and regulated away fillable vapes and buying your own juice. Most vapes available now are disposables and have one and only one concentration level available.
I am more of a cigar smoker, I used to smoke a cigar every month, every other month and sometimes all month long for several months, but I was never addicted, I have gone a year or two without cigars, currently I have not had one in about five years now, give or take. I could have one any moment, they sit in my humidor, but I did try ecigs for a little bit. I'd love to have an alternative that doesn't compromise my health, but until then I'll keep my cigars.
I love cigars for various reasons, but there's no true alternative that's worth while.
Pipes?
Yeah, I love my pipes.
To be clear, it's 100%, definitely not good for you - but the level of harm doesn't seem to be even close to cigarettes or chewing tobacco.
The amount consumed is much less, the smoke shouldn't be entering your lungs, and if there are tons of good, "all-natural" tobacco out there without all the additives put in by cigarette companies.
I literally saw a meme image saying this last year. Crazy to see it become reality.
Literally the worst idea. I quit vaping a while ago. Vaping made me, it gave me dopamine hits even when I got nothing done. Quitting has made me noticeably more focused, alert and let's me push myself harder. That feels great to me.
I've heard that you can get a "0%" vape that has no nicotine in it, but the vape shops I've asked have no idea what I'm talking about or why I'd want it. Any idea if that's real?
Every day we stray further from god, etc, etc.
Yes this is and has always been an option. Find any real vape shop at any point in the past... _checks calendar_ 15 years at least, and they will sell you nearly any of their "e-juice" products with no nicotine.
Trick is, the companies making disposables vapes/pods/etc generally don't offer them because those are generally large tobacco and other companies and ... well, why would they manufacturer and sell a non-addictive cigarette when an addictive version exists.
0% nicotine was an option almost 20 years ago when I started vaping and is still available. The tobacco companies getting involved and polluting the streets with single use lithium ion batteries and shit have done nothing but made everything worse.
Thanks for the confirmation!
Yep, it exists. I tried it before, and it still felt as bad because of the smoke you're inhaling. Our lungs are extremely sensitive receptors and are pretty much supposed to interact with absolutely nothing else other than the air we breathe.
It's useful for quitting. A lot of smokers/vapers struggle with "oral fixation", ie needing something to do with their mouth. Gradually lowering your nicotine to 0% is a way to get off nicotine without having to face this problem at the same time.
That’s how I did it and what I recommend to my friends (who vape constantly). It’s two habits you have to beat, why not do them one at a time?
You can get Propylene Glycol or vegetable glycerin and vape that.
Here's a company with a product meant specifically for this. [0]
[0]: https://tryfum.com
It's apparently a thing, "nicotine free" vaping
A perfect, ouroboros of addiction
i know this sounds dumb on the surface, but assuming you have other restrictions in your life it works.
Vaping tastes great, can be done indoors, doesn’t need an ash tray, and others around you are mildly annoyed vs visibly upset. Cigarettes are the direct opposite of all of those. The added friction could put someone over the hump.
Evolution:
The next will be nicotine free tobacco. .. the leafs will be watered for a undisclosed amount of time to remove the nicotine as it's water soluble. It's like decaffeinated coffee - it's when you need this tastes but your heart can't take it anymore :)
This has effectively been a product for many years, 22nd Century Group sells very low nicotine tobacco smoking cessation products.
If you can also keep the usual tobacco-processing chemicals and other additives out, is the bare leaf, nicotine-free, arguably no worse than other common vices ?
Generally I would say that burning(flame/smoldering) anything is bad for you. Even simplest hydrocarbons (methane, propane, butane) with imperfect combustion have negative effects. You can make it slightly better, but smoke is most likely always carcinogenic.
Cars, trucks, powerplants, indoor air, are bad for you.
Indeed they are, and you should also minimize exposure to the fumes from cars/trucks/powerplants and try to improve indoor ventilation.
I don't generally suck on the tailpipe of my car like a cigarette or vape.
BS, fake news, and dumb. Did a handful of humans actually post about this? I'm sure, and probably tried it for a day. But "people," as in a group of people large enough to be remotely news worthy? No. This is just bait. Also not hacker news.
How is this not The Onion…