In a Puff of Smoke

I’m a smoker.  Well, I was a smoker until roughly 72 hours ago.  For about 22 years, I smoked anything and everything from filterless cigarettes, cigarillos, Swisher Sweets, Cowboy Killers, Lights, Ultra Lights, menthols, and even clove cigarettes.  If it was legal, I probably smoked it at least once.

I started when I was in the military, in a secure compartmented information facility (SCIF) communication center — basically a large multi-floor building with all the windows painted dark.  My coworkers would occasionally leave for what seemed like half an hour at a time, while I would be left routing messages, delivering messages, and troubleshooting errant messages.  Of course, this would happen multiple times during an 8 hour shift.  Being in the comm center, on the 3rd floor of a SCIF, it would take about 5 or 10 minutes to get to the designated smoking area within the compound outside the building, passing through checkpoints along the way.  I got tired of pulling more than my fair share, so I would sometimes go on a smokeless cigarette break that easily turned into a cigarette break, and then sometimes a multi-cigarette break since it took some effort to get to the right place to be able to take a break.  Cigarettes allowed me a certain freedom, to step away from what I’m doing so that I can congregate with the other “break takers”.

Over my 22 years of smoking, I’ve met many passersby, networked with fellow smokers, and made a few friends I would not have otherwise been able to if I had not taken a “smoke break”.  Of course, the nature of my work has changed in that 22 year span.  I no longer work in a secure communications center, luckily I also don’t work on the 3rd floor, and I don’t work in the military, but for most of the 22 years I’ve worked at a desk.  Sometimes the desk was in an office, sometimes it was in a 5-foot by 4-foot enclosed space inside a mobile comm center, and sometimes the desk was in a tent in the dirt and mud.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to push my chair back, get up, and walk away from the desk, to think and smoke, for about 10 or 15 minutes at a time.  In fact, I can’t imagine being at a desk for a full 8 or 9 hour day without leaving, except to go to the bathroom or lunch.  I don’t think I can function being glued to a desk for more than a few hours.  I need to step away sometimes, for clarity and reflection.  I can say this with certainty now because of what happened 72 hours ago.  I quit smoking.

I don’t think I should need to explain the reason I quit smoking, because the health risks connected with smoking and tobacco products are not secret.  There are on the order of 4,000+ chemicals, additives, and carcinogens in a cigarette.  Some of them are consumed by flames, while some of them are blocked by a filter on the end of the cigarette, while others find their way into the mouth and lungs.  No one can say with any degree of authority exactly what is in a cigarette, but everyone knows they are bad for you.  This is not a tale about why I quit, but how.

One day while downloading things in Vuze, I was shown an advertisement for a new brand of electronic cigarette: Blu.  In the advertisement, it was explained briefly that the company had constructed a battery charger that recharged electronic cigarettes and looked almost exactly the same as a regular pack of tobacco cigarettes.  I thought this was genius.  No longer confined to smoking near an electrical source of power, the electronic cigarette (e-cig) could be put back into its “pack”, in my pocket, and be recharged the next time I pull it from my pocket.  I had casually looked into electronic cigarettes a few years ago, and concluded that it was just way too cost prohibitive, not practical, and would likely cause me to just stick to regular cigarettes.  That’s what I did, though I did make the switch from Lights to Ultra Lights.  I had looked into the gum, but seemed just as much or more expensive than cigarettes.  The patch scares me, and is also not cheap.  This time, it seemed that e-cig technology had advanced enough for them to actually be practical for me.  I began researching.

My first goal was to determine if electronic cigarettes were worth it.  Namely, would I get the same enjoyment and satisfaction out of e-cigs as I would a normal tobacco cigarette?  Would it feel like smoking, or would it feel like…  something else entirely?

I started searching the Internet. (God, I love Google.)  I found reviews, forums, videos, review websites, review videos, recommendations, e-cig makers, sellers, e-liquid makers and sellers, and entire “mod” underground community akin to Altoid Tin Hackers that modify electronic cigarettes to boost the amount of smoke or make the batteries last longer.  I researched for about 2 months, and learned several things.

Electronic cigarettes have actually come quite a way since first conceptualized.  The entire thing almost went away completely due to a rumor, but things bounced back, and the movement is growing.  E-cigs are well on their way to being a better alternative to tobacco cigarettes.

Being a type A personality but also a smoker looking to quit, yet being skeptical, rather than just reading good things about e-cigs, I tried to find reasons it wouldn’t work.  If e-cigs gave me reasons for it to fail for me, those reasons would linger for a while and might eventually be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I would probably go back to smoking regular cigarettes.  So, the first question I asked the Internet:  What goes into an electronic cigarette, and are those ingredients bad for me?

Electronic cigarettes are comprised of 2 types:  3-piece, and 2-piece.  The older 3 piece design consists of the battery (the largest component), the atomizer (the middle piece), and the cartridge (the component that actually meets the lips, and holds the nicotine solution).  When in use, the user puffs on the cartridge end which draws a portion of the solution toward the atomizer, powered by the battery, and heats up the liquid to a vapor that is drawn into the mouth.  Typically, when this is going on an LED at the end of the battery will light up, to give the illusion of a regular cigarette’s fiery ball at the tip.  Through normal use, a cartridge will last about as long as a pack of regular cigarettes, depending on how strongly the user inhales.  The batteries of 3-piece e-cigs last about a day or so, again depending on use.  A 3-piece e-cig atomizer, however, typically lasts 5 or 6 months, needing to be replaced with a new one.  Individually, each component is rather cheap.  A battery costs about $30.  A cartridge, about $2.  An atomizer, about $20.  The newer technology 2-piece design, however, integrates the cartridge with the atomizer.  This means that replacing the atomizer separately is no longer needed, because when the cartridge is empty, a new cartridge is replaced with a completely fresh atomizer.  Cost is also somewhat reduced, because cartomizers (cartridge + atomizer) cost around $2-$3 each, and last about as long as a pack of cigarettes.  But, these are merely the components of the device.  What actually goes IN an electronic cigarette, and is it bad for me?

As it turns out, most e-cig makers tell you exactly what they put in them, since its only the “juice” that gives the taste and enters your body.  The typical ingredients for an e-cig:

• one of the following:
  • Propylene Glycol (PG),
  • Vegetable glycerine (VG), or
  • Polyethylene glycol 400 (PEG 400)
• Nicotine
• artificial flavor
• water

The most popular of the glycols seems to be PG, propylene glycol.  I realize that seems like a pretty scary name, even so much that it seems like its hiding behind the friendly acronym PG, but its pretty harmless.  PG is used quite a bit in:  fog machines, asthma inhalers, nebulizers, food coloring, moisturizers, hand creme, mouth wash, cosmetics, and massage and fragrance oils.  The only harmful (relatively speaking) ingredient in an electronic cigarette is nicotine.  This is comparable to the Nicotine Patch, or Nicotine gum, which also contains a similar amount of the substance.

My next Devil’s Advocate question:  Is it more expensive than regular cigarettes?

Short answer:  It depends.  Long answer:  Initially, yes, it will be a bit expensive, mainly because you are buying something you don’t already have –  batteries, chargers, etc.  If you purchased an expensive lighter at any point in your smoking career, this is a similar cost.  So, accessories aside, the actual cost needs to be compared in terms of use.  Since smokers typically measure their use in terms of packs smoked per day, that’s what I’ll use.  A pack of cigarettes, nowadays, costs around $5-$6, depending on where you buy them — a pack at the corner grocery costs less than a pack at a highway gas station, which costs less than a pack at the airport.  A cartomizer costs around $2-$3, depending on make, model, and “juice” flavor.  Also, you can purchase “blank” cartridges that you can fill yourself with liquid that you’ve bought through a third party, but “blanks” typically cost the same as pre-filled flavored cartomizers.  So…  e-cigs seem to be cheaper, at first glance.  Lets dig deeper.

A typical lithium-ion battery, which seems to be what most e-cig makers are using, degrades over time since they can be recharged a finite number of times (this varies depending on the quality of the battery, but ranges anywhere from 500 to 1000 times), and battery makers usually give a battery a much lower rating under 500 so that they can give a guarantee it will work at least that long.  So, lets say a typical battery will last a year.  That’s $30 per year.  This is a cost that cigarette smokers don’t pay — lighters are much cheaper annually.  So, now lets do some math.

I’ll assume I’m a pack-a-day smoker, which I’m not, but that makes the math much easier.

1 5-pack of cartridges:  $10  (this should last at least 5 days), so a year of cartridges would cost $730

2 batteries: $60 (each should last at least a year, but by the third year we may need to buy another)

That brings our total for e-cigs to $790 per year, for the next few years.

Cigarettes: $6 per pack.  365 times $6 = $2190.  That’s one year.

Ok, maybe that was too harsh.  $5 per pack, for 365 days = $1825.  Ok, so the actual cost is somewhere around two thousand dollars, given the fluctuating price of cigarettes, and taxes, and the fact that will only go up each year by some small amount.

That leaves me with a difference of over a thousand dollars per year.  Granted, I’m going to need chargers and accessories to work with whatever e-cig, but that will never approach the $1000 per year figure — and if it does, I’ll still break even with a large pile of accessories.

How different is it from regular tobacco cigarettes?

This was a difficult one to answer, since there is no website that can detail the experience without having a heavy commercial advertisement slant to it.  It seemed the answer for me depended largely on my own cigarette smoking style.  Some e-cig makers focus on making the “smoke” vapor look exactly like cigarette smoke, while others focus on creating the most amount of vapor per puff, while yet others focus on flavors.  I was beginning to see that since this was such a new thing I might have to purchase/try a bunch of e-cigs until I found one I liked.  Then, I saw this video.  This gentleman, after a short rant about why he no longer chats on a particular forum, begins to outline all the different electronic cigarettes he’s tried through his quest to find the perfect “vaping” device.  The video is pretty informative, since the guy is rather well-versed and considers himself an expert, but the thing that really got me…  what he said that galvanized things for me and convinced me I was on the right track…

“I’ve spent well into $2,000 on e-cig products, juices, but I have not one complaint about how much I’ve spent.  I don’t smoke, so that’s worth a million dollars.”

The gentleman seems really knowledgeable about what he doesn’t like.  I have no idea what he is talking about through most of the video, but one thing seems pretty clear:  He seems to really like “cartomizers”.  This is coming from a guy that appears to be using e-cigs since the beginning, and has formed a well-experienced opinion.

With all the answers telling me that I should make the switch, all that was left for me to do was decide WHICH electronic cigarette to get.  This sent me back onto the Internet in search of the best electronic cig for me — which meant I had to watch review after review after review. I had to add up all the pros and cons for each one that got a good review, then I had to decide on functionality and reliability versus cost.  This is not going to be a review of electronic cigarettes…  but this might turn into a review of e-cig review sites!  This site was pretty helpful.  Clearly, it recommends Green Smoke, so I checked that one out first.  While it seemed really expensive, the reviews were the best — almost as if they had nothing bad to say at all.  Second on their list was Blu, which is what brought me into this quest.  The review wasn’t that great, but I kept looking.  Third on their list was White Cloud.  1 word:  EXPENSIVE.  Even on the White Cloud website, they claim to be the most expensive electronic cigarette on the market (then they go on in attempts to justify the price).  The next on the list was V2, and then South Beach.  After reading all those reviews, I decided to go for another opinion.  So, I went here.  What an excellent site.  He has a clear and sensible methodology that I wish all reviewers of any product would have.  Given his information on that website, Green Smoke seemed to be the best.  So, then I went here.   Not a bad site, really, except she seems to rank all e-cigs pretty closely together.  Then, I noticed that for most reviews there is a coupon code.  After a bit of investigation I learned that once you buy into a particular electronic cigarette, the big brand name makers give buyers a coupon code, so that regular customers can refer their friends and get a discount.  That seemed like a biased approach to me, since all the reviews I’m interested in have a coupon code.  Then, I ended up here.  What I really like to see is real people, saying real things, with money they’ve spent from their pocket — really can’t get a better review than what a person thinks about how they’ve spent their own money.  That review eventually led me to this site in which the woman claims V2 is her favorite e-cig.

I was convinced. Not only was I sold on the concept of electronic cigarettes, I had a pretty good idea which one — either Green Smoke, or V2.

After thinking about it for a bit more, I settled on V2.  Green Smoke seems like a really good product, but… well…  They have very few flavors, and the cartridges are a tad more expensive.  V2 seemed like the better choice of the two since I get more options when dealing with them.

I ordered the “Travel Kit”, which included almost every accessory they offer, with 2 batteries (1 automatic that is activated by just puffing on the end, 1 manual that is activated by pressing a small button), and 15 cartridges of a flavor of my choosing.  I opted for 3 flavors; 5 of vanilla, 5 of cherry, and 5 of “red” which is supposed to be similar to Marlboro.  June 12, 2011, I ordered the kit with USPS Express shipping.  June 14, 2011, 10am was my last tobacco cigarette because at 11am the same morning my electronic cigarette was in my hand.  I’ve also re-ordered a ‘sampler’ pack in which they include all flavors they have, so I can try them all, and another 5-pack of cartridges.  I’ll try “menthol” this time, though I was not a frequent/regular menthol smoker.  The description of the flavor says its a mix between peppermint and cool mint, which doesn’t sound bad.  Their newest flavor, Cola, I don’t think I’ll try, but I’m waiting for their newly announced yet unreleased flavors, banana, and coconut.

I may even branch out into other cartomizers(cartridges) that are compatible with my e-cig, though I doubt I’ll go the route of buying “blank” cartridges and liquid to fill my own.