I started smoking as a child in PRimary school at the age of about 10 or 11 but not on a daily basis and maybe three or four of the kids I hung around with would share one cigarette before school. By the time I was 13 or 14 I was smoking daily. This was in the late 70’s and early 1980’s. So if truth be told I was smoking tobacco products with the exception of a 2 year abstinence in the 80’s for about 30 years. I tried to give up in my 20’s repeatedly, when gum came out I tried that and end up addicted to the cigarettes and the gum for a while. I tried the gum again several times in the 90’s but it gave me indigestion and also flatulence regardless of how determined I was to use it. I tried the patches once but they were the most useless of all since i tended to sit around having no clue what to do, irritated and eventually fearful of a nicotine overdose I took them off and started smoking again. I tried Electronic cigarettes using a Green Smoke device sold as a starter in the local shopping centre. It cost 50 euro at the time with two batteries and 5 cartridges. At this stage I was smoking 20 to 30 a day and couldn’t afford to do that so had swapped over to smoking black market cigarettes. These were horrible things and were clearly really poor quality. The first time I put the electronic cigarettee in my mouth the difference between it and the cheap smokes I’d been using was really apparent. That was the last time I bought cigarettes on the black market. I’ve used the electronic cigarettes since. My breathing has improved immensley… I knew I had been damaging my lungs smoking and in fact I know that most of that damage over 30 years is now done and likely irreversible in my lifetime. But my breathing has improved a lot. I still smoke but it is literally one or maybe two cigarettes a week, usually almost religiously on Friday evenings watching a movie. I’m sure I could do without it, but what the hell. I now actually keep my cigarettes in the fridge because 20 lasted me so long that they began to go off! I know thats weird but hey they cost 10 euro a box I’m not spending that sort of money for them to go off once a month or so. E-cigarettes now cost me about 20 euro a month for whatever flavours I like. I’ve upgraded my green smoke for a larger eGo type e-cig and the battery life on those 808 models is abysmal anyway. I tried all sorts of flavours of e-liquid. Gave up buying the really cheap stuff from china and tried some of the better known brands. Fact is myself and millions of others are off the cigarettes permanently. Now I’m sure there are questions to be addressed regarding the safety of e-liquid and electronic cigarettes in general. I think its more effective if we wait until we know what the issues might be before suggesting what they are and trying to ban electronic cigarettes without any evidence of those ‘potential’ dangers. And the world is a laboratory at the moment. Millions and millions of pepe are smoking electronic cigarettes and dumping the tobacco. I’m sure if there were in fact any health issues with so many determined to see the end of electronic cigarettes they would be easily able to point it out in the huge population of electronic cigarette users by now. Since I don’t see that, I have no problems. Either way its my choice and governments and regulators should back off as they have no business interfering in my personal choice. So I don’t care anyway, if there’s regulation I’ll just buy them illegally, or make my own along with my own e-liquid…it’d be pretty hard to regulate a consumer substance like glycerine out of existence.