What the drip costs

I've argued about mechanism. This chapter is the bill.

A day with no gaps. That's the first cost and the one that contains the others. From the hand going out before your eyes open to the draw after the lamp goes off, there isn't an hour in which you're not either topping up or about to. You've arranged a day around a substance without noticing you were arranging anything, and that arrangement is what dependence means. Not weakness. Just a day whose shape is set by a line that has to be held.

A small anxiety, kept and relieved. The fall arrives a hundred times a day and is reversed a hundred times. Each reversal feels like calm. But the fall is the vape's, and between them, a hundred small edges and a hundred small reliefs add up to a day spent slightly on edge with a remedy in your pocket. Parrott's finding was that smokers as a group are more stressed than non-smokers and less stressed after they stop. I'd expect the same to hold for someone running the loop this tight, though I don't have a study to show you.

The nights, as in chapter 13.

The throat and the cough that you've come to call normal.

The money. A third of smoking, the NHS says, which still comes to a figure over a year that would surprise you if you worked it out. Do work it out. Coils, liquid, the device you replaced when it was dropped.

The hand that's never free. You don't hold your child's hand and the vape at the same time. You don't carry the shopping and vape. In practice you do, by juggling, and the juggling is the habit deciding your day for you.

The not knowing. Not knowing the day's number. Not knowing whether you've cut down or not. Not knowing what would happen at forty minutes because you've never let forty minutes happen. A habit you can't measure is a habit you can't judge, and this one has arranged itself so that it can't be measured.

And the child watching, if there is one. The NHS says not to vape around babies and children as a precaution, and that under-eighteens shouldn't vape. Beyond the precaution, there's what they see. They see that an adult's hand goes to their pocket every few minutes and comes out with something that makes them calm. They'll want one. Some of them will get one.

None of this is the cost of smoking. I said that at the start and I'll keep saying it. But it isn't nothing, and most of it is the cost of a habit that lost its ending, and the ending can be put back.