I started smoking very young and continued for 53 years. I was a heavy smoker going through at least 50 grams of tobacco per week. I visited my local store and saw a cigalike product on display and decided to try it – that was over six months ago and I have never smoked a cigarette since, but more importantly, I have never had any desire to do so. What a contrast this is to the years and years and years of guilt and fear and unsuccessful quit attempts, using, first: patches; then inhalators; then patches and inhalators; then patches, inhalators and counselling, and even once,at my own expense, hypnosis. Something that I am aware of, but few others are is why e-cigs work when other products do not – it is this… Every time I tried to stop smoking, even before I stopped, when it came to the last fag or two, the cravings started. Hang on! This is before I stopped. How could I (and I bet everyone else) be feeling cravings BEFORE stopping? The answer is panic. Cravings and panic must be related. Perhaps this is why counselling has a successful though marginal impact on smoking cessation attempts. The single biggest change in my life is not physical, it is freedom from guilt and freedom from fear. Society has, quite rightly, pointed out the dangers of smoking. It has put pressure on smokers to try and quit, but it never supplied the means for the majority of smokers to do so. Patches and other totally inadequate products were brought out to help, but all that happened in reality, though I hesitate to say deliberately, was the creation of a very cosy relationship between the tobacco giants and the pharmaceutical moguls. One selling a product to make the consumer ill, and the other, a product which offered to make them better, but which very rarely did. No losers except the consumer there. And all of this aided and abetted by the very people dedicated to wiping out smoking! I suspect that the attempt to regulate e-cigs is through pressure from first, the pharmaceutical industry, who will loose a great deal of money, then the tobacco industry, who will not really loose out because they will move into the e-cig market (Aided by regulation) The governments will loose out, charities will have much less to do as will medical practitioners of all kinds.. yes, a great deal of invested interests at stake and because the general public, (media and MP’s not excluded) are ignorant about and/or are biased, they have the perfect weapon of all the prejudice and hatred against smoking and smokers that they have created at their disposal. Let us just hope that the ‘smog’ created by those who would like to see people dying from smoking for financial gain is cleared sometime soon. This would be helped most of all if the medical profession and charities could free themselves from pharmaceuticals chains.