I started smoking at the age of 18 and regretted starting very shortly after starting but i could not bring myself to quit. It helped with my anxiety and stress levels but i could feel the damage it was doing to my body. I tried many times to quit using different methods: snapping myself with a rubber band, chewing gum, sunflower seeds, the patch… but nothing worked. I even bought an e-cig in 2009, one of the early attempts at them and I thought it was cool but it didnt really help too much. I quit cold turkey again not too long and stayed off for about 6 months but i slowly picked the habit up again when work started getting more stressful. One of my coworkers was using a vape mod. I thought it was cool and gave it a shot and found it to be much more pleasing to use than a cigarette. i didnt stink like smoke and it was also just kinda fun using. I liked how you could get juice in different concentrations and soon enough, I had bought the lowest concentration juice and my own first mod and I’ve loved it ever since. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in months thanks to my mod and couldn’t be happier. I feel much better, have more energy and am happier and less stressed out. I understand the risks associated but i know that it’s better than smoking and for the FDA to try and classify a vape mod, which is literally a piece of metal (you stick a battery and a lightbulb into it and boom, now you have a flashlight instead of a vape) in the same category as a cigarette makes zero sense. A vape mod has no nicotine in it until someone buys the nicotine juice to use, but even then a person can buy zero nicotine juice. Restricting vapes will be harmful to people like me who used vapes to quit smoking and many people will fall right back into smoking tobacco. If the FDA isn’t taking money from Big Tobacco and really is concerned with the public’s health, they will not classify vapes the same as cigarettes.