I smoked for 43 years and tried quitting many times to no avail. I used the patch and nicotine gum and tried going cold turkey but always gravitated back to cigarettes, all it took to fall off the wagon was seeing someone else smoke or smelling the smoke, sometimes it was stress that caused me to relapse. My wife also smoked, one day she went online to look for smokeless ashtrays and found e-cigarettes instead, at that time all the articles written on e-cigs said that they contained harmful ingredients such as antifreeze so we put that idea aside for another year or more and continued to smoke cigarettes. Finally in 2009 we started researching the e-cigarette in greater detail and read the New Zealand Study by Dr. Murray Laugesen and realized that the articles we had previously read were bogus and misleading. We bought our first e-cigarettes over 4 years ago and never looked back. We dropped down our nicotine level to about 12 to 18 mg. and can honestly say we don’t miss cigarettes in the least, even if someone else is smoking around us. we are healthier, the smokers cough was gone after the first few months, our house smells better and our dogs are happier. Best decision we ever made.