"It calms me down"

Now the calm, because it's the thing you'd defend.

Nicotine leaves the body fast. The half-life in blood is about two hours, meaning that two hours after a dose about half of it has gone, though it builds up over a day of use and there's still some there in the morning. That figure is from a review of nicotine's chemistry by Neal Benowitz and colleagues in 2009, and it's not disputed. The practical consequence is that between doses the level is always falling, and as it falls a set of feelings arrives. John Hughes reviewed the research on what happens when people stop using tobacco and found the feelings that reliably appear are anger, anxiety, low mood, difficulty concentrating, impatience, insomnia and restlessness. Those are withdrawal symptoms. In someone who's stopped, they peak in the first week and last two to four weeks.

But you don't have to have stopped to feel the beginning of them. You only have to have gone a while without. That's the argument the psychologist Andy Parrott made about cigarettes in 1999, and it's the one this book rests on, so I'll give it plainly. Smokers say cigarettes relieve stress. But smokers as a group are slightly more stressed than non-smokers, teenagers get more stressed as they take up regular smoking, and people who stop end up less stressed than they were. Smokers' moods are normal while smoking and worse between cigarettes. Parrott's conclusion was that the calming effect is mostly the reversal of a tension that built up as the nicotine ran down. The cigarette wasn't adding calm. It was taking away an irritability that the last cigarette had set up. Parts of his argument were disputed at the time, and I've noted that in the notes, but the shape of it has held.

Now put that together with the vape's lack of an ending, because this is where vaping is different from smoking and, I think, worse in one respect. A smoker had twenty falls a day, each big enough to notice, and twenty reliefs. You don't have twenty. You have a hundred, or two hundred, each so small you never see it as a fall. The line dips a fraction, something in you tightens a fraction, the hand moves, the draw arrives, and the tightening goes. You experience that as the vape calming you. What you're experiencing is the fall being reversed, dozens of times a day, by the thing that caused it.

I should be careful here. Parrott studied smokers, not vapers, and the extension to a vape is mine. But the nicotine is the same molecule with the same half-life, and the loop doesn't need smoke to run. If anything it runs more smoothly without the smoke, because there's nothing to make you wait.

So is the calm real? Yes. You do feel calmer after a draw than before. What I'm asking you to look at is what before was. Before was the fall. And the fall was made by the draw before that. The vape is calming a state that it manufactures, and the whole transaction leaves you where a non-vaper is all the time, for free.