"A cigarette had an ending"

Think about what a cigarette was, as an object. It had a start, which was the lighter. It had an ending, which was the filter, five or six minutes later. It had a place, which was outside, and often a walk to get there. And it had a cost, a small one each time, in the packet getting lighter and the price of the next one. Between cigarettes there was a gap, whether you wanted one or not, because you were at your desk and the cigarettes were outside.

Now think about the vape. No start. No ending. It doesn't burn down and it doesn't go out. No place, because it's allowed anywhere you're not actually forbidden and plenty of places you are. No cost per draw that you could feel. And so no gap. The thing that made a cigarette countable, that gave it a shape, was the ending, and the vape has removed it.

This isn't a small difference. It's the whole difference. A cigarette delivered a dose and then stopped delivering, and you had to decide to have another. A vape delivers a dose whenever your hand moves, and your hand moves without asking you. What used to be twenty doses a day with gaps between them has become one dose, spread thin across all the hours you're awake, with no gaps at all. Nobody chose that. It's what happens when you take the ending off a habit and put it in a pocket.

A tap left running is a fair comparison for two sentences. Nobody decides to use a bath's worth of water. They decide not to turn the tap off, and the water runs until someone does.

The dose itself hasn't got weaker. Peter Hajek and colleagues in the UK tested a pod device at American strength against a cigarette in 2020, in twenty people who both smoked and vaped, and found that the pod delivered nicotine to the blood about as fast and about as high as the cigarette did, and faster and higher than the other vapes they tested. That was a stronger liquid than is sold here, so the numbers don't carry over, but the direction does. The modern pod vape isn't a weak cigarette. It's a cigarette-shaped dose with the ending taken off.

So when you say the vape is a cigarette without the smoke, I'd say it's a cigarette without the smoke and without the ending, and the second half is the part you need to look at. The smoke was the harm. The ending was the shape. You got rid of the harm, which was right, and lost the shape by accident, and a habit with no shape can only grow.