What You Need to Get Started-A SIMPLE Shopping List for the New Vaper

I'm going to make it really easy for you. Here's a shopping list:

First, you're going to need a battery and a charger.

Buy yourself at least TWO Smok Winders

Why Two? Because you don't want to get caught with a dead battery. If you have two of these, and you keep one charging while using the other one, you'll never be caught off guard.

Speaking of Charging, you're going to need at least one of these

USB Ego/Winder Charger

I keep one in my car and one connected to my laptop, and one of the batteries charging.

Second, you're going to need something to put juice in. I usually recommend these:

Kanger EVOD

These are stupid easy. Unscrew from the bottom, fill with juice, replace bottom base, and vape.

Pick up a box of replacement heads, too-they don't last forever.

All of the above comes from the same site, www.buckysbargainvaping.com

I am not affiliated with the site in any way other than being a customer. I've dealt personally with the owner, and I've purchased the exact same items I just recommended. The prices are about as cheap as you're going to find, and shipping is fast and free. Shop around if you like, but this is all you need to get started, with the exception of one little thing...

JUICE.

This part is hard. Everybody has different tastes. And juice comes in every goddamn flavor you can imagine. Seriously, every flavor you can possibly think of. Personally, I like the tobacco flavors. I know a lot of people who like the sweet, candy or dessert stuff. Unfortunately, there is no way I can recommend an across the board starter juice. All I can recommend is that you check out a few sites, order a few small bottles of whatever sounds interesting, and FIND YOUR VAPE! Once you find one or two flavors you like, you're golden.

Here are a few of my favorite Juice Vendors, in no particular order:

Backwoods Brew
Mr. Vape
Heather's Heavenly Vapes

...the list goes on and on and on. There's a flavor out there for everybody. It just takes time to find it.

As far as nicotine level goes, most people start out somewhere between 12-24 mg. Think of a Marlboro Medium cigarette as the benchmark, at about 18mg. If you like an Ultra Light, you're probably going to be okay wiith the lower nic level. Some people start at 18 and work their way down. I've stuck around the 18-24 mg range since I've started, and I've  been good.

That's all you need to get started. A nice, portable, reliable setup. And you can thank me for suggesting the winder/twist style batteries instead of the "fixed" or unregulated batteries later. It's kind of a mouthful to explain, which I will do in a future post. For now, just trust me... ok?

Enjoy.

VS

MORE PROOF-E CIGARETTES AS GOOD AS PATCHES IN HELPING SMOKERS QUIT

I know it worked for me-I haven't had a real cigarette in over a year. Personal testimonials aside, we've got fucking SCIENCE on our side, Bitches!

NBC NEWS 9/7/13

Electronic cigarettes work about as well as nicotine patches in helping smokers kick the habit, researchers report. And e-cigarettes helped people smoke fewer cigarettes overall, even if they didn’t quit completely.

The study is the first major piece of research to show that the products, which deliver a nicotine mist using a cigarette-shaped pipe, can actually benefit smokers.

The findings, published in the Lancet medical journal, are not quite enough to make public health experts embrace e-cigarettes, which are not yet regulated and which are growing in popularity. But it’s enough to make them look more closely at whether there may be some benefit to them.

“You're trading one addiction for another addiction,” Dr. Cheryl Healton, president and CEO of the anti-tobacco Legacy Foundation, told NBC News. "(But) it may be that for some people, this will be a better way to quit, and there may be people who've tried other things and haven't been able to quit who will quit with this."

For the study, Chris Bullen of the University of Auckland in New Zealand and colleagues recruited 657 smokers who wanted to quit. They divided them into three groups, to get either 13 weeks’ supply of e-cigarettes, nicotine patches or placebo e-cigarettes that contained no nicotine.

After six months, 5.7 percent of the volunteers had managed to completely quit smoking. It was slightly more in the e-cigarette group, but not in a way that was statistically significant, Bullen reported.

It’s very difficult to quit smoking, but the e-cigarettes also appeared to have helped people cut back on real tobacco. Bullen’s team found that 57 percent of volunteers given real e-cigarettes were smoking half as many cigarettes a day as before, compared to 41 percent of those who got patches.

“While our results don’t show any clear-cut differences between e-cigarettes and patches in terms of quit success after six months, it certainly seems that e-cigarettes were more effective in helping smokers who didn’t quit to cut down,” Bullen said in a statement.

“It’s also interesting that the people who took part in our study seemed to be much more enthusiastic about e-cigarettes than patches, as evidenced by the far greater proportion of people in both of the e-cigarette groups who said they’d recommend them to family or friends, compared to patches.”

Healton said that was a provocative finding. “It does also suggest consumer acceptability of the product is higher,” she said.

U.S. health officials are very concerned about the rise in popularity of e-cigarettes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration released a report on Thursday showing a doubling in the number of high school students who have tried them, to 10 percent.

More than 21 percent of adults have tried them at least once, but the CDC says they are addictive and may themselves be dangerous.

“We don’t know much about them,” says Dr. Tim McAfee, director of the CDC Office on Smoking and Health. But he says they could potentially be useful if tobacco companies would stop making products like cigarettes and make e-cigarettes instead – and if those e-cigarettes did indeed turn out to be less harmful than conventional cigarettes.

“Our nirvana is a world where nobody is dying from death and disease caused by tobacco,” McAfee told NBC News. “If you have a product that doesn’t kill people, that is where the money should be going, that is where the promotion, the marketing should be going.”

They are pricey - an e-cigarette product ranges from $10 to $120, depending on how many charges it provides. And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of brands. FDA says some appear to contain carcinogens, and there is some evidence that nicotine is not only addictive, but may itself damage health.

“They could have inherent dangers that are greater than using something like gum or the patch,” Healton said.

CDC says tobacco is the leading preventable cause of dis­ease, dis­ability, and death in the United States, killing 443,000 people a year. 

Public health experts are desperate for ways to help people quit smoking, but it is hard. The American Cancer Society says only 4 percent to 7 percent of people manage to quit on any single given try. Drugs such as Chantix or Zyban can raise this rate to 25 percent.

There’s also counseling, nicotine gum and patches, hypnosis and acupuncture, and companies are working on anti-nicotine vaccines.

Maggie Fox NBC News

Erika Edwards contributed to this report.