7 Reasons why smoking is better than vaping

1. Smoking is everywhere

Run out of your favourite smokes? Chances are a re-up is only 5 minutes away. Heck, even pharmacies sell cigarettes - you try picking up your favourite vape from Walgreens. I’m right, aren’t I? It’s an easy life being a smoker. Until it kills you.

2. Smoking is easy

What’s to know? You put it in your mouth, set fire to it, take 12 puffs and you’re done. Vaping, not so much. let’s face it, there’s a learning curve to most vape that simply doesn’t exist with smoking. And do you know when to change a coil? Do you know when you’re done vaping? Isn’t having yet another thing to charge irritating? Smoking is really easy.

3.  Smoking is cool

You might think you look awesome vaping. Hey, maybe you do! But the reality is that vaping is not now and will never reach the glamorous heights that smoking once did. From the 40s to the 80s everyone smoked - movie stars, musicians, philosophers, artists and accountants. Arguably, smoking was the coolest thing that everyone did. Even now despite all the “de-normalisation” of smoking, the reality is smokers deep down have a romantic attachment to their habit that will never exist with vaping.

4. Smoking kills

Oh, yes, it does. This one will pull out the cranks who say it doesn’t, but smoking really does kill. It kills lots and lots of people. It’s probably the most dangerous consumer product available: certainly on a population level it creates more harm than any other product sold. OK, so we we don’t know the absolute safety of vape yet, but we do know, without a shadow of a doubt, just how dangerous smoking is.

And this is a good thing! Why? Well, typically smoking kills people when they’re old. You don’t spend the final 10 years being a burden on your family, on welfare systems. Your pension provider will love that you smoke, your life-insurance provider will charge you a fortune for it. Sure, before it kills you it will damage your skin, make breathing harder and cause all manner of other health complaints, but just think of the good you’re doing society by shuffling off early.

5. Smoking is addictive.

So, this might not benefit you personally, because you’re addicted and probably find that a bit challenging. Oscar Wilde had a different way of thinking about this, though, which may or may not help: “a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure”, he wrote, “it is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

For most smokers, the addiction part is something we can do without. But for the tobacco companies and anyone with their stock - phewie! there’s some revenues! What could be better for making greenbacks than a cheap plant, rolled into tubes and sold by the container load? Oh, I know, a cheap plant, rolled into tubes that hooks approximately 50% of people who try it.

Shame it kills (although see number 4). Is vaping addictive? We don’t have a good answer to this, but smoking surely is.

6. Smoking is social!

“excuse me, could I borrow a cigarette?”

“oh sure, when you going to give it back?” - and a billion variations thereof.

We’ve all been there. Smoking is, at its core, deeply social. It’s a sociality facilitated by the easy donation of a smoke from the possessor to the bereft; the transaction lubricated by the shared outsider experience of what it is to be without a smoke.

Does this work with vape? Well, yeah, but in a really clumsy way that depends on several variables: is it just some liquid you’re after? Do you need to borrow my power bank? You need a piece of canthal or cotton? You want to actually use my actual vape and you don’t have alcohol swabs? Get knotted.

7. Smoking tastes like smoking

OK, so your mileage many vary on this one as to whether you think this is a good thing. But only smoking tastes like smoking. There’s loads and loads of tobacco flavour vape out there - and some of it’s really good -  but it is nothing like smoking at all.

So, if it’s the original you’re after, you need to stick with smoking.

Yes smoking may kill you, yes smoking’s expensive, yes smoking makes you smell, yes it is absolutely disgusting in every way possible, but I’ve just given you 7 solid reasons why it beats vape.