DOSE:	300 ug	vaporized	Nicotine
		vaporized	Nicotine	(daily)

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

A Glowing Experience that I Cannot Describe

I was a teenage smoker. I started at 15, by accident, and quit at 23, with tremendous difficulty and apparently divine intervention. I was always so grateful to have been able to quit that it is a shock to find myself addicted and now vaping via eCigs at the rate of about $10/day I can ill afford. I had quit for almost thirty years at the time of the experience I will try to relate here.

I didn't mean to start again, but I was an altered and bad state of mind from the side effects of Abilify, and would have done anything to make it stop. (Never mind why I was taking that drug; it was a chain of events and a clueless doctor.) I'm not currently taking any psychiatric drugs and had never been prescribed any until a few months before this nicotine experience. I don't think the Abilify played into this experience because it was exactly like the experiences that got me hooked in the distance past.

Some younger friends had been over and had rolled some marijuana into an emptied-out cigarillo wrapper. They weren't interested in the tobacco, so they left it piled in an ashtray on my kitchen table when they departed. I was dealing with the intense agitation of akathisia at the time, and I espied the little pile of low-quality tobacco and wondered if it would help. I got a glass pot pipe, packed a modest bowl, lit it, and inhaled.

A few seconds, and swoooon. Pleasure. Not euphoria, not ecstasy. Beautiful, brilliant, all-encompassing and very private pleasure. Just me on a chair, and this feeling that is unlike any other I've experienced. It is impossible to describe, and I have only met one other person who attests to it. (I met him at a $300 Allen Carr seminar, which kept me away from tobacco for approximately 5 minutes after I left the classroom at the end of the day.)

I read another glowing experience, and noted the writer's mentioning that he felt like a king. I felt like some kind of celestial being. Not really a queen, but someone to whom all good things are meant to flow in abundance. It's like my brain turned to beauty and love and my whole being was imbued with infinite wonderfulness.

Oh boy. I decided I would only do it once a week, so the next morning, when I did it, I knew I could keep it under control if I just did it in the morning. Later that day, after I had bought a pack of Winstons, I knew I'd be fine if I gave it up after I finished the pack, however long that took. Long before I'd finished the pack, it had stopped happening. I was habituated. Nonetheless, going for more than an hour or so without smoking would always result in the fixing of my attention on the acquisition of the next lungful of tobacco smoke.

I'm not an experienced drug user, but I have felt the effects of IV morphine in various emergency room visits. It's lovely, but it's not this. Not by a long chalk.

I ended up smoking for two years, miserable about it, and then transitioned to eCigs. I use a brand that combines a white, cylindrical battery with a screw-on cartridge that supplies 2.4 mg of nicotine. It took a while to find the type of product and brand that suited me best. I blow through (suck through) about two cartridges a day. As a smoker, I smoked at least a pack a day. I like this eCig brand better than I ever liked smoking. I don't cough, and I don't fill ashtrays with bad-smelling cigarette butts.

I am submitting this under 'glowing experiences' because that's the part that's worth sharing--it's rare. Apparently, from what I can glean from published research on first experiences, those who get the transcendent bliss experience are the most likely to find themselves hooked, and hooked I am. My experience could just as easily fit in 'train wrecks and trip disasters.' That's how I regard the outcome of the fateful decision I made while contemplating the cast-off cigarillo fillings, but the world is not low on nicotine addicts and our stories.

Even knowing that if I were to abstain for some length of time, whether it's months or years, I could enter the pure, enveloping bliss again, I can't seriously contemplate quitting. I've tried willpower, patches, Alan Carr, shame, fear, Chantix (I drew the 'kill yourself now' card on that scary adventure) and everything else...if I don't get some nicotine, it's all I think about until I get some.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 110176
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 49
Published: Mar 24, 2017	Views: 9,447
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Nicotine (383) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Addiction & Habituation (10), Glowing Experiences (4), Various (28)