Ive seen it go two ways, you start with the vape pod or all in one systems, get bored and you

1. Buy a big boy vape, roll your own coils, maintain and clean it, the whole shabang. Or 2. Smoke cigarettes

I have seen many people choose option 2. The big vape systems are sometimes large, heavy, and clunky, require sometimes very publicly dis and re assembling a little contraption, carrying juice on you, lots of things that put fellow people off. Ive seen people be ridiculed for carrying around so much vape stuff. It kinda falls into the neckbeardy categories at least for my place/time, just because the first people to do it made it their whole lives and refused to talk about anything else, it got a reputation. It's both easier and less socially risky to just buy some cigarettes.

Though I will say smoking cigarettes is not without social risk. Typically women will heavily dislike the habit except for the ones that do it themselves. I've seen whole houses get addicted to cigarettes just because one person went out to smoke when they drank every weekend. I have never seen the same phenomena with vaping. Though I very nearly missed the target generation for things like juul.

That was case years ago. Nowadays people just buy refillable tanks with disposable coils that perform on par or better with what an above average person can create. The devices are inexpensive when amortized over months-years depending on how well taken care of. 30-200 is the range for devices with the sweet spot around 60-100. Tanks are 20-50, but a lot of devices include them. Coils are about $2 or less wholesale/from China, and retail for 5-15/ea depending on how greedy/low volume the shop is. Coils last for 1-4 weeks. Juice costs about $0.01-0.04/ml to make and 60ml bottles previously sold online for $5ish, they go for 20-60/ea in retail stores including taxes. Yeah, $0.6-2.40 in product is being sold for 10-30x the cost to manufacture. At most half of that is tax, the rest is profit and funding asinine marketing or paying for lawyers and lobbyists to pull the ladder up. This ain’t about children, it’s about a cash cow.

Source: I’m friendly with a few people that have run vape shops/companies and got out because they can’t afford to lobby against Phillip Morris or comply with pmta with annual revenue in the tens to low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Blame Juul for the vaping crisis in schools, and shut them the duck down. Then let adults have their safer and less expensive alternative to cigarettes back. I’ll take cotton Candy clouds over cigar smoke every single time.

I quit smoking with Juul, and still use Juul - better experience and more convenient than smoking. I quit smoking because it was inferior to the juul experience AND had health benefits AND juuling is significantly less antisocial - it wasn't a challenge because it was better in about every way. Nicotine gum or previous generations of vapes didn't scratch the itch well enough, juul scratches the itch better.

Apparently juul can no longer ship to private addresses in my state, so I guess I'll have to start looking at other alternatives or go to the tobacco shop to pick up refills regularly.

I'd like to step down my nicotine dosage gradually, but juuling is unfortunately not very conducive to that - only 5mg or 3mg, so I'll probably have to roll my own solution, which is less convenient so I worry about compliance.

Anecdotal evidence: My girlfriend has been smoking since she was 14. She had no motivation to quit, no matter how many times I annoyed her about it. After she switched to vaping, she can't even bring herself to smoke again because the smell and taste are much more obvious to her now, even with flavored cigarettes.

In a separate but similar case, the same thing happened to me with marijuana smoking. I never had an issue with the 'smoke' aspect of consuming cannabis, but now that I have tried cannabis vaping products (e.g. precision heating dry plant material or liquid concentrates), I nearly gag when I try smoking it again and I am immediately aware of and irritated by the awful smell that clings to me afterward.

Anecdotal, but all my friends juul'd in university (some quit some still use it daily). Probably about 30% of them at some point tried to quit juuling by smoking cigarettes instead thinking that the bad taste would deter them for smoking and therefore cause them to consume less nicotine overall. Needless to say that did not work and a few of them now use both cigarettes and juuls.