I began using tobacco products at the age of 15. As we all know teenagers tend to do idiotic things that can cause permanent damage to themselves for unexplainable reasons. I started out smoking cigarettes, but then switched to snuff when I noticed my breathing becoming shallow and wheezy. This went on for a few years and became normal. When I become more involved in extracurricular activities in school I no longer had the time to dip snuff and went back to smoking cigarettes. Once again my breathing got worse, but I felt like there was no helping it due to my schedule. When I entered college on a vocal scholarship I was smoking two packs a day of unfiltered cigarettes, I was told by my voice teacher that I would either need to quit smoking or lose my scholarship. I attempted to quit only using willpower which was unsuccessful to say the least. I was looking at just losing my scholarship when I visited a family friend who had a strange looking thing on a lanyard around her neck. She informed me that it was an e-go electronic cigarette. She had smoked three packs a day for as long as I knew her and had told me that she hadn’t had a cigarette in over six months. At this I decided it couldn’t hurt to at least look into this e-cig business. I looked into the studies and found that this vaporized nicotine was far healthier than the tar and ash I was breathing in at the time so I decided to give it a go. I purchased a Volcano Inferno kit and some 30mg nicotine liquid and started vaping. Almost immediately I could feel a difference in my breathing and could tell that this could work. At first I did really well with my e-cig and worked my way down to 24mg nicotine but due to my own blunder in not ordering enough liquid I ran out and had to smoke analog cigarettes for a week while I waited for more liquid. It was awful. I was coughing and just felt terrible that entire week. When my liquid finally came in the mail I was overjoyed that I didn’t have to smoke those terrible things anymore. Of course that week undid my progress and pushed me back up to the 30mg strength but it has been just over three months since then and already I’ve made it back down to 24mg. I hope that I can eventually work my way down to no nicotine at all, but even if I don’t succeed in that I know that vaping is definitely healthier than smoking, so if I can’t be perfect at least I can be better.