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I gave up Vaping and it was much harder than I thought

Reflections for an ex addict.

Yaakov C Lui-Hyden
7 min readAug 21, 2022

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From my late teens till now, I have been a smoker or ex smoker. I have gone years as one, fought a battle and become the other. Only to go back with various life triggers.

I haven’t found quitting cigarettes especially difficult. You can go cold Turkey and sweat it out over 3 days and be largely clear of it. Not a fun approach but relatively effective. Patches didn’t really work for me when I tried them(and had trippy dreams). Nicorette gum(flavoured) worked a treat and I got hooked on that instead-and I knew one woman who chewed such gum for a decade. Looking at the science, nicotine itself isn’t terribly bad for you- it’s a stimulant, so does increase blood pressure and heart rate, but its effects are largely benign. So if I was in a country where I could have access to such gum as previously, I would probably be chewing it now. But there is none here, it’s not legal.

To give up smoking, I vaped.

In this country, the Republic of Georgia, the majority of men and a significant amount of women, smoke. When I first arrived here, as was also the case when I arrived in Russia and Turkey, smoking was permitted everywhere. You could smoke indoors at restaurants, in nightclubs, in bars etc. Wonderful for the smokers, sucky for anyone…

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Yaakov C Lui-Hyden
Yaakov C Lui-Hyden

Written by Yaakov C Lui-Hyden

Yaakov is a world traveller and is accused of being an Australian. Published several novels. He writes about travel, writing, geopolitics and trading.

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