I am as well.

I was a hopeless addict. I smoked a pack a day, had tried almost every method available to give up and failed, and had concluded that I’d almost certainly die young from smoking.

Vaping was genuinely a miracle cure for me.
1/ https://twitter.com/iandunt/status/1266654065892696064

As Ian’s thread points out, vaping is not neccesarily safe. Inhaling particles of stuff into your lungs is generally a pretty bad idea. It is safer than smoking though. Probably much safer.

On that though, say the estimations of 5%-15% as harmful as smoking are wildly wrong. Say it’s 33%, or even 50% as harmful as smoking. The alternative for me (and many) was not stopping, and reducing that to 0%, but continuing with the 100% option. It’s an addiction.

So I’ll take those odds. Who wouldn’t, faced with them?

I don’t want to be a shill for an industry. There are issues around regulation, testing, purity, and particularly access by children. But these have to be addressed properly with public policy, not used as a stick to beat a potentially harm-reducing innovation.

Unfortunately, many countries, and the EU, have chosen simply to treat vaping as a form of tobacco smoking. This (which is incidentally exactly what tobacco companies want) approach undermines efforts to regulate and safeguard properly and appropriately.

I’m still a nicotine addict. I might always be a nicotine addict. The question is whether you think it’s important to stop people being nicotine addicts, or to stop people being killed by a massively harmful nicotine delivery system like cigarettes.

As with drug legislation, moral approbation always gets in the way of harm reduction. I care more about people not dying than whether I disapprove of them or not.

Particularly when the nature of addiction means that for most, like me, their only real choice was made many years ago (when I was 16 to impress a girl, as it happens, because I’m an idiot).