(The details: male, age 60+, London UK, started using an ecig in 2009, smoked from the age of 15, on and off.) I had never heard of e-cigarettes before someone gave me a couple at work. They were the stick look-alike kind, different versions. I got three or four of them in the end. They were interesting but I had no intention of quitting smoking as there was no reason to: I only smoked from one to four cigarettes a day, enjoyed them too much to want to stop, and figured there was minimal risk from that level of consumption. Although not many per day, they had to be extremely strong: I used to make fat roll-ups of a 50-50 mix of tobacco from Winston or Lucky Strikes and RYO tobacco such as Golden Virginia, because it was no longer possible to buy the no-filter strong cigarettes I preferred. My first smoke of the day was after lunch but sometimes not till early evening, although they had to be super strong. Even as a kid I’d smoked the strongest cigs, Capstan Full had been my favourite at age 16, the no-filter extra strength kind, when the other kids who smoked used Peter Stuyvesant or other mild brands with filters. Soon I came across boxmods, which at the time were the way to go if you wanted more power: they were boxes or small tins with two 14500 batteries and a 5 volt regulator. Those suited me fine as you could put a low-ohm atomiser on the 5 volt box to get a decent result. A huge improvement over the wimpy stick type ecigs. We only had atomisers at that time, it was long before cartos, never mind clearos and all the rest. Even so I had no reason or desire to quit smoking, the boxmods were simply an alternative to one smoke a day. After several months (and it was longer than 6 months) I found, though, that I was only smoking one cigarette a day, the rest of the time it was the ecig (5v boxmod). Maybe part of the reason it was going this way was that I had taken to extracting liquid from tobacco by boiling it in glycerine and adding it to the e-liquid in order to make the vape ‘stronger’. Then after nearly a year I found I couldn’t remember the last time I had smoked a cigarette. Obviously, I didn’t miss it any longer. I just forgot to smoke. That was several years ago. Over the years I’ve cut down on the power a bit but still use high-nic @36mg. I don’t vape much compared to others (less than 2ml a day), but still have to have it strong. Nicotine doesn’t really have any serious effect on me, I can vape 36mg continuously or spill it on my arm and leave it – no noticeable effect either way. However I can’t reduce the nic strength vaped, as consumption just goes up to compensate. It’s a little hard to work out how this need for high-strength nic equates with very low comparative usage volume, and not needing to smoke/vape till later in the day; but people come in different flavours I guess. I didn’t want to quit smoking in the first place, but now have no intention of going back. Haven’t smoked for years now and probably never will again. Even if vaping gets banned it will be easy enough to get supplies, for those of us who know the ropes. If it did somehow become impossible to buy supplies, I’d go back to smoking. I don’t think nicotine skin patches would do it for me, unless you can get them A4 size. I did have regular lung issues such as bronchitis but that stopped after quitting the cigs. Both my parents smoked like chimneys as everyone did in those days; my old man had a heart attack in his early fifties. I can’t remember ever noticing it as a kid but we must have lived in a thick smog – my parents and all their friends smoked, and no one ever went outside to light up. As a kid when I went to my dad’s office, the first thing his boss did was offer me a Blue Liner out of a silver box on his desk (that’s a Navy-only brand, only available in the Services, but he was an ex-admiral or something). Then my dad got to be boss, so the cigarette supply became easier when I went up there on a Saturday morning. Any boss worth his salt now would have a box of ecigs on his desk. How times change.