Couple days getting my nicotine fix and not feeling utterly gut-punched and sluggish after a borrowed cig did the thing for me...it's weird, but so is smoking for the first time, I adjusted.
Hard part was feeling a little more alive. Weren't used to it.
Much later on, month ago, I bummed a cig...Jesus, Buddha, and Spaghetti, what it did to my lungs, instantly...couldn't breathe.
Spent more time holding it than hitting it, and I don't like to let shit go to waste, otherwise I'd have tossed it into a gutter.
I've got a crazy and physiological reason, but it's not understandable until you get away from smoking for a while:
You can breathe again!
You can smell this shit from across an entire parking lot!
(Vaping) You're not as fatigued by hitting the battery-run machine and suffering nicotine overdoses like you did with those two or three cigs in the morning!
No monoxides, no carbon dioxide, no lighters unless you sway elsewhere on the front where you need one...but...fuck...I could breathe again
Nicotine is twitchy; I over do it, but go look at /r/coffee - similar alkaloid...I drank entire pots of coffee back in the day and thought I needed those too.
There's people actually looking at nicotine addiction and brain-fuckery; so far they're neutral-positive.
It's a psychological addiction - you gotta up-jump your life path and "Well, I went to this diner and finished a cig" - repeatedly throughout your life...little easier to get your nic buzz and move on.
Fuck do you do when you're done?
Hard to do. At best. I merely advocate the only option I know that worked for me - if you can just walk, we shouldn't have this discussion.
Come to michigan, /u/nitegul - I'll hook you up with my best and let you hit it; it's weird like hookah at first, but conversely, you're not sucking down particulates and cocoa as a mind-control agent when burned and all that horseshit.
And to your last - recidivism is rampant for addictions; if you can and want to quit cold, fuckin' ay - go for it. I've seen few successes thus far; "Hey, just grab some patches like the hospitals do!" is disingenous - they're covering their asses on that one legally.
To the original thing...and the original criticism...where do you think gum and patches and the like...originate from?
It's better because it's a patch that went through the same pharmaceutical firms?
Hard, IMO, to yell about tobacco farmers selling shit wholesale because they can't do animal husbandry or soy farming on their land.
Research. Many of these people are banking on this to save their farms because when Dad dies, they're going to have to sell the thing to just pay the taxes or walk away.
That's modern farming.
"Some days, it was 52 bucks..."
Tobacco farmers are eeebil tho.