I used to smoke Marlboro Reds. I quit in '98.
I was nicotine free for about 11 or 12 years. Then hookah bars started getting cool. So I'd go out with my friends. Then some of them bought hookahs for parties at their house, so I did the same. Then I started smoking at home when there were no parties happening. Eventually, I found myself coming home from work, packing the hookah, and keeping a coal on it all night until bedtime. At which point, I made the obvious realization: "I'm smoking again."
Around that time, you could get e-cigs from china, but they weren't a "thing" in the US yet. I'd heard about them because my step-son got suckered into a $70/month subscription to some fly-by-night chinese e-cig service on his bank card, and I had to help sort it out. Which led me to to doing research about them.
They had a lot of the characteristics I liked about hookah: Cool flavors, less harsh smoke, not smelling like an ashtray. So I started vaping and put away the hookahs. Sometimes, my liquid or atomizers would be seized by the FDA, even though they really had no leg to stand on. But what can ya do? I wasn't about to start smoking cigs again. And even with the occasional lost shipment, it was still cheaper than smoking too (by a ton).
Eventually, we reached the state we're in now, which is nice. There's a lot more technology around the vaping devices--they equipment is safer, has better features, and atomizers now last me 8 weeks instead of 5-7 days (for the same approximate cost per atomizer). I can fill a tank which usually lasts me half a day (instead of dripping 20 drops of liquid into the end of a cartridge every half hour or so). And, unlike cigs, I don't find myself winded or short of breath after exertion, and I have just as much lung capacity as when I was smoke free (which is very noticeable as a woodwind player). So, it works for me. I don't even have to buy batteries. I work in IT, and I took home a box of dead laptop batteries, ripped them open, got out the multimeter, and pulled all the good 18650's from the shell. I ended up with about 15 good batteries.
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I think e-cig companies are resistant to that idea--they'd rather be "alternative nicotine devices." If they were bonafide smoking cessation devices, they'd be regulated as a medical device instead of a vice.
