How Vaping Helped Me Quit a Pack-a-Day Habit at 33

My name is Neil Price. I’m 33 years old, I live in Portland, Oregon, and I haven’t touched a cigarette or a vape in fourteen months. That sentence still feels weird to type because for ten years, smoking was as natural to me as breathing. More natural, honestly. I thought about smoking more than I thought about breathing.

I started at 23. Late bloomer by smoking standards, I guess. I’d made it through high school and most of college without picking one up. Then I got a job at a screen printing shop after graduation, and every single person on the crew smoked. Camel Blues. That was the brand. Someone offered me one during a late shift, and I took it because I was tired and everyone else seemed to get these little five-minute vacations throughout the day. Within a month, I was buying my own packs. Within three months, I was a pack a day.

For the next ten years, I smoked a pack of Camel Blues every single day. Sometimes more on weekends. I tried to quit twice before the thing that actually worked. The first time was about four years in, when my girlfriend at the time gave me an ultimatum. I went cold turkey for eleven days. Eleven miserable, rage-filled days where I snapped at everyone, couldn’t concentrate at work, and felt like my skin was crawling off my body. On day twelve, I bought a pack at the gas station on my lunch break and smoked three in a row in my car. My girlfriend found out, we fought about it, and we broke up two months later. I told myself it wasn’t about the cigarettes, but looking back, the cigarettes didn’t help anything.

The second attempt was patches. Nicoderm CQ, the full step-down program. I made it through Step 1 okay. The 21mg patches kept the worst of the withdrawal away. But when I dropped to Step 2 at 14mg, the cravings came roaring back. I started cheating, smoking two or three cigarettes a day while still wearing the patch, which you’re absolutely not supposed to do. My heart raced. I got dizzy. I felt sick. So I ripped the patch off and went back to smoking full time. That was attempt number two, and it lasted about five weeks total.

After that, I basically gave up on quitting for three years. I told myself I’d deal with it later. I was only in my late twenties. I had time. That’s the lie every young smoker tells themselves.

What changed was moving to Portland. I’d been in Boise before, and smoking there was pretty normal in my social circle. But Portland is a different world. I started a new job at a tech company doing front-end development, and nobody smoked. Not one person. There was no designated smoking area. When I’d come back from a smoke break smelling like an ashtray, I could see people physically lean away from me in meetings. Nobody said anything directly, but I knew. I started feeling ashamed in a way I hadn’t before.

Around the same time, a buddy of mine named Scott told me he’d quit using a vape. He’d been a two-pack-a-day Marlboro Red guy for fifteen years, way worse than me. He said he started with a JUUL, then switched to a refillable pod system, and slowly dropped his nicotine levels over about eight months until he was vaping zero-nicotine juice. Then he just stopped. He made it sound simple. It wasn’t simple, but the idea stuck with me.

I did my research. I’m a nerd about things like this. I read studies, read forums, read Reddit threads from people who’d done exactly what Scott described. The consensus was that vaping isn’t harmless, but it’s significantly less harmful than combustible cigarettes, and it works as a bridge for a lot of people. The key word is bridge. You’re not supposed to move in and live there forever. You’re supposed to cross it and get to the other side.

I bought a Caliburn G2. Nothing fancy. I started with 50mg salt nicotine juice, which is high, but I was a pack-a-day guy and I needed it to actually replace the cigarettes. The first day I used it alongside my cigarettes. The second day, I cut down to half a pack. By the end of the first week, I wasn’t smoking cigarettes at all.

Now, I want to be honest about this part. The vape satisfied the nicotine craving, but it didn’t perfectly replace the ritual of smoking a cigarette. A cigarette has a beginning and an end. You light it, you smoke it, you put it out. A vape is just… always there. I found myself hitting it constantly, way more than I ever would have smoked. My nicotine intake probably went up in those first few weeks. That worried me.

So I started being intentional about it. I’d leave the vape in another room. I’d only take it outside, mimicking the old cigarette break pattern. I gave it boundaries.

After six weeks on 50mg, I dropped to 35mg. The first two days were rough. Irritability, some headaches. But nothing like cold turkey withdrawal. It was manageable. I stayed at 35mg for another six weeks, then dropped to 20mg. That step was easier. Then 12mg. Then 6mg. Then 3mg.

The hardest moment of the whole process was the jump from 3mg to 0mg. I’d been vaping 3mg freebase juice for about two months, and I knew the next step was zero nicotine. But 3mg felt like barely anything, so how hard could zero be? Turns out, your brain knows the difference between a tiny amount of nicotine and none at all. The first three days on zero were genuinely difficult. Not as bad as cold turkey from cigarettes, but I was anxious, restless, and I couldn’t sleep well. I kept telling myself it was just 3mg, that it was mostly psychological, that I was almost done. I white-knuckled through it.

Day four on zero nicotine was better. Day five was better still. By the end of the second week, I felt normal. I was still vaping the zero-nic juice, though, and that’s where I had to face the other half of the addiction: the hand-to-mouth habit, the inhaling and exhaling, the ritual.

I kept vaping zero-nicotine for about three more weeks. Then one day I realized I’d left my vape at home and I was at work and I didn’t care. I didn’t go back for it. I didn’t think about it much. That was the turning point. The moment I knew I was actually free was when the thing I’d been dependent on became forgettable.

I threw the vape away that weekend. Not dramatically. I didn’t make a ceremony of it. I just tossed it in the trash with some old takeout containers and that was that.

The whole process from first puff on the Caliburn to throwing it away took about eight months. Not fast. But every week of those eight months, I was moving in the right direction instead of standing still or going backward.

Life after quitting is different in ways I didn’t expect. The obvious stuff happened: I can breathe better, I can taste food again, I don’t wake up coughing. My teeth are whiter. I save roughly $250 a month between cigarettes and the vape supplies I no longer buy. Those things are real, and they matter.

But the unexpected stuff is what gets me. I don’t plan my life around smoking anymore. I used to turn down window seats on planes because I’d get antsy being trapped. I used to show up to movies late so I could smoke right up until showtime. I used to skip long hikes because three hours without a cigarette sounded unbearable. All of that is just gone. I didn’t realize how much mental space smoking occupied until it was empty.

My relationship with my family is better too. My mom had been asking me to quit for years, and I’d always brush it off or get defensive. Last Thanksgiving, she hugged me and said she doesn’t worry about me the same way anymore. That hit harder than I expected.

I still get cravings occasionally. They’re rare now, but they happen. Usually when I’m stressed at work or when I smell someone else’s cigarette smoke on the street. The cravings last maybe thirty seconds, and then they pass. I’ve learned that cravings are like waves. You don’t have to do anything about them. You just let them wash over you and they recede on their own.

I want to say something about the vaping method specifically, because I know it’s controversial. Some people will tell you that switching to vaping is just trading one addiction for another. And they’re right, if you stay on the vape forever. The whole point is the step-down. If you’re not actively reducing your nicotine and working toward zero, you’re not using it as a bridge. You’re just living on the bridge. I’ve seen people do that, and five years later they’re still vaping 50mg salt nic and telling themselves they’ll quit eventually. That’s not a quit plan. That’s a substitution.

But if you’re disciplined about the step-down, if you set a timeline and stick to it, vaping can work. It worked for me. It worked for Scott. It’s not the only way, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s one tool in the toolbox.

If you’re still smoking right now, here’s what I’d say to you. You’ve probably tried to quit before. You’ve probably failed. That’s normal. Most people fail multiple times before it sticks. The average is something like seven to ten attempts. I only needed three, but those first two failures felt like proof that I couldn’t do it. They weren’t proof of anything except that I hadn’t found the right method yet.

Find the method that works for your brain and your habits. Maybe it’s cold turkey. Maybe it’s patches. Maybe it’s Chantix. Maybe it’s a vape step-down like I did. The method matters less than the commitment. You have to actually want to be done, not just want to want to be done. There’s a difference, and you’ll know it when you feel it.

You are not alone in this. Millions of people have done exactly what you’re trying to do. I’m one of them. Fourteen months ago, I couldn’t imagine going a single day without nicotine. Now I don’t think about it for weeks at a time. That’s not willpower. That’s freedom. And you can have it too.