Quit vaping the Dutch way - by smoking

An ultra-low IQ mother tells her story

AI generated

The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant has published an article that is so mind-bogglingly stupid and irresponsible that you have to wonder if it’s some sort of prank. It is titled ‘When this mom discovers how much her son vapes and how harmful it is, she comes up with an unorthodox alternative’.

The unorthodox alternative was… smoking.

What follows is courtesy of Google Translate. Strap yourself in.

It is a ritual that recurs every few days, my son is just getting back into his groove and puts on some nice music, I am slightly out of sorts. It is all too bizarre and ridiculous for words. Without wanting to dwell on it too much, I get out of the car, into the gas station, leaving my son slightly guiltily behind in the car. I have placed the order before: ‘one pack’, or one Marlboro Gold. I will deduct the cost, 12.50 euros, from his pocket money – although that is not quite enough. When I get back to the car, I throw the cigarette butts at him as quickly as possible, as if to throw off my guilt. But it does not help. I feel like a bad mother. And he feels, I know, like a bad son. When our eyes meet, he says what I'm thinking: 'This can't go on much longer.' I can hear you thinking: what will the world come to if mothers start buying packs of cigarettes for their minor children? And I completely agree. But, watch out, it gets even more absurd.

It really does.

We have switched to this dubious practice to ensure that my son no longer vapes. Here is the bizarre paradox: if he did, he would not be smoking one pack of cigarettes a week, but the equivalent of ten packs a day [ignorant nonsense - CJS]. But more about that later. I understand that your brain needs some time to process this. Because weren't we all busy, encouraged by the government, raising the first Smoke-Free Generation? With smoke-free catering, platforms and trains, sports canteens and, oh yes, smoke-free schoolyards? We were indeed. Drive past any high school in the Netherlands and you can see that the beautiful ideal has now, yes, gone up in smoke. Strategically, just outside the boundaries of the school grounds, that promising generation is now vaping en masse. Vaping may, according to tobacco manufacturer Philip Morris, fall exactly within the definition of ‘smoke-free’ – as was recently heard in a TV broadcast by Argos Medialogica – because e-cigarettes formally do not produce smoke from burnt tobacco; that does not alter the fact that an entire generation of children is already addicted to nicotine. My son’s addiction also started at school. In the second year of secondary school to be precise. The first vape he saw on a classmate was immediately exciting to him, he says. Soon after, he took his first puff. The flavour did what it was supposed to do: he liked it. And after that, things went very quickly. More and more friends got one, and a few months later he bought his first vape himself. He was 14. And he just did it, because he liked it, ‘because of the tricks’ – he lists them: the French inhale, the ghost, and blowing circles – ‘and the flavours’. How could he know!

The day after his 15th birthday, we found the first vape in our house, a nice gift from a friend. My husband and I hastily announced strict measures: 'No vaping in our house!' It led to a lot of cat and mouse. Every time we found another brightly colored disposable thing, in bed, under the bed, in a coat pocket or lost sports bag, it ended up straight in the trash. But it turned out to be like mopping with the tap open, because as quickly as they disappeared, the monsters reappeared, or our son was too smart for us. So it took a while before we realized that the sweet, sickly smell upstairs in his room was not coming from the empty bags of candy lying around, but from all those friends who were still secretly vaping there. Although apple-bubblegum, sweet caramel, kiwi-passion fruit-guava and all other 16,997 flavors have been banned for almost a year now, in practice it can be seen that this government measure has not curbed the vaping trend [flavour bans don’t work? fancy that! - CJS]. If only because flavored vapes from China are still available everywhere via TikTok and Snapchat - any schoolchild can tell you that.

No, the most recent figures show that vaping is actually spreading rapidly among young people. The Youth Health Monitor 2023 shows that vape use in the 12 to 16 age group has quadrupled in the past four years. One in five young people between the ages of 12 and 25 (21.7 percent) now say they have vaped in the past year. And even primary school children cannot escape it: 8 percent of children in groups 7 and 8 have used a vape. The tobacco industry is clearly winning [not if the vapes are coming from China - CJS].

If you’re wondering how anyone can be so poorly informed, it seems that the Netherlands is full of blowhard medics making it up as they go. Several of them are quoted in this ignorant woman’s article, starting with this chap…

It is all the result of a very sophisticated marketing strategy, says LUMC pediatric pulmonologist Noor Rikkers.Rikkers is co-author of the recently published book Stop vaping, this is how you help your child. ‘The criminal thing is that the tobacco industry knows exactly how the brain of young people works and that they are extra sensitive to addiction. You can see that in the figures. Young people over the age of 18 start vaping less often and after the age of 25 this happens even less. It is precisely in that early adolescent phase from 11 to 14 years that most children start vaping.

Research also shows that 70 percent of children who vape also switch to smoking [total bollocks - CJS]. It is precisely this dual use that is the most harmful.’ In other words: 2-0 for the tobacco industry. According to Rikkers, the most ultimate and perverse example of the lengths to which the mainly Chinese vape manufacturers go to reach children as consumers is the smart vape. If you don't know it yet, you should definitely google it. I was shocked when I first saw that thing. A vape like a compact, cheerful electronic device, complete with LCD screen, lights and sounds, that combines all the addictions of our youth: texting, snapping, gaming and therefore vaping. 'Handy', was the opinion of children on NOS Stories. Anyone who wants to go to the next level in the games only has to take a puff. My god. My husband and I got angry about it. Very angry. At the children, yes, a little bit, but especially at the tobacco industry that has mercilessly targeted our children.

The tobacco industry doesn’t make any products like this.

How dare companies seduce our children like this with only one goal: to raise a new generation of smokers, because their customer base of die-hard smokers is dying out. How sick are you then? And how is it possible at all? Why doesn't the government intervene?

Your precious government has already banned flavours. How did that go?

Why don't you hear our ministers and members of parliament talking about it? Why is there no excise duty on vapes and why isn't it banned outright, like alcohol?

Alcohol is not banned outright. How thick is woman?

Fortunately, more hopeful messages from supporters also appeared on social media. It turned out that there was an active anti-lobby going on.

No kidding! Hundreds of millions of dollars of it, thanks to Mike Bloomberg.

There also appeared to be a citizens' initiative, Nicotinee. Say no to nicotine, which I immediately signed, together with more than 72 thousand others. The goal: to have it laid down in law that young people born after 2012 can never get their hands on nicotine-containing products.

UK-style generational prohibition, but with vapes added on? I’m sure that will stop your son illegally buying illegal vapes with illegal flavours from China.

‘There is a lot of misinformation circulating about vaping,’ says Rikkers

There is, isn’t there!

‘It wrongly has an innocent image.’ According to her, this has everything to do with how the vape was originally conceived. About twenty years ago, it was marketed as an e-cigarette as a healthy alternative to cigarettes, as an aid for people who wanted to quit smoking. ‘Many people still think it is healthier, but we now know that vaping has its own harm. It really isn’t smoking light.’

In God we trust. Everyone else has to bring evidence. So let’s see it.

I realise with some discomfort that we too have fallen into that trap. When our son initially confided in us that he vaped, we were initially kind of ‘happy’. If that was all. From his stories we always knew pretty accurately what happened during the many sleepovers, parties and chill nights, who did and didn’t smoke, secretly smoked weed, drank or got drunk. The fact that our son, with the exception of a few experiments, generally stuck to vaping, we were perfectly fine with. Anything better than cigarettes! But is that really true? The answer from both De Kanter and Rikkers is exactly the same: ‘You can’t say that like that.’

Rikkers: ‘If you only look at the nicotine content, a vape of 600 puffs with 20 mg/ml nicotine is the equivalent of about two packs of cigarettes. But for the rest, a vape and a cigarette cannot be compared and therefore it is impossible to say when smoking is less bad than vaping and vice versa.’

Firstly, it’s not equivalent to two packs a day in terms of nicotine because smokers absorb more nicotine than vapers. You can’t just look at the amount of nicotine on the pack and assume that is how much is delivered into the blood stream.

Secondly, it is not ‘impossible’ to say whether vapes are better or worse than cigarettes. Aside from the obvious fact that vapes do not use combustion or produce smoke and that vape juice contains no carbon monoxide, there is masses of toxicological data showing that vaping is vastly less dangerous than smoking. Look at this 1,500 page report for a start. It is almost criminal than newspapers are still printing such lies in 2025.

However, it is now known that vaping is much more harmful than previously thought, say the doctors.

More lies.

Rikkers explains: ‘Recent research with laboratory animals and on human cells is very worrying. Cigarettes work on the basis of combustion and contain tar as a harmful substance. Vapes do not have that. They work on the basis of heating so-called e-liquids, a mixture of, among other things, carriers, flavourings and nicotine salt, but that has its own damage. Most vapes release more toxic and addictive nicotine than a whole pack of cigarettes [meaningless bollocks - CJS]. When flavourings are heated, carcinogenic substances are released [name them - CJS]. Heavy metals such as lead and cadmium have also been found in the urine of children, originating from, among other things, the filament in the vape.’ [not from legal vapes, I bet - CJS]

But, both doctors emphasise, there are also many things we still do not know. De Kanter: 'We have no idea what is in many of the Chinese disposable vapes and how harmful it is, let alone in the long term [better allow regulated EU vapes on the market then, eh? - CJS]. We can't investigate that either, because it is simply not ethically responsible to let a group of young people vape and compare the effects with young people who don't vape [that would only be true if observational epidemiology was the only science - CJS]. We won't know how harmful it really is for another ten years.'

I distinctly remember people saying this ten years ago. Fifteen even. The years have passed and there is still no documented case of a single person dying from using a legal nicotine vape. I have been using vapes since 2009. How much longer do we have to wait for a few conclusions to be drawn?

As a parent, I don’t feel any more reassured. Especially since I see that the vaping problem at home is only getting worse. We reach the climax during the Pentecost weekend. When my son comes home after four days at a friends’ campsite, he is not happy at all. Why not? It turns out that he has puffed his 12,000-puff vape in a row in those four days [a 12,000 puff vape is highly illegal and no one would vape that much in a day anyway - CJS]. After a bit of Googling, we find out that if a vape of 600 puffs is equal to about two packs of cigarettes, a vape of 12,000 puffs is equal to the shocking amount of forty packs of cigarettes. In four days! It is the moment that the three of us come to the unorthodox conclusion that smoking one pack of cigarettes a week is not such a crazy idea after all.

I don’t mean to be rude, but you and your husband are a pair of mouth-breathing imbeciles.

Now, a few months and many trips to the gas station later, we are starting to seriously doubt that. Are we helping our son with this? [No - CJS] Is this still responsible? [Again, no - CJS] And isn’t this exactly what the wretched tobacco industry wants: to prepare our children for the real thing via vaping? [Not really, but you’ve managed to create the otherwise mythical gateway effect through your demented efforts - CJS] On the other hand: the more I read and learn about vaping, the more I am convinced of the idea: anything is better than vaping.

Should people like this be allowed to breed? It’s a tricky ethical question.

Slowly but surely, the uncomfortable feeling that he, the sporty guy, was addicted to something so unhealthy began to sink in. And once he realized that, he wanted nothing more than to stop, but how? Parental advice, or the stories about how we ourselves had once quit smoking, fell on deaf ears. He found the youth app Quiddy, which Trimbos recommended, childish and the tip to buy the famous Stop Smoking by Allen Carr in audiobook form, old-fashioned: ‘Mom, we live in the 21st century. Everything is on YouTube. I already know everything.’

Brace yourself…

How happy we were when, in the spring – from one day to the next – we succeeded. Yes, thanks to the cigarette. He didn’t quite reach his goal of a pack of cigarettes a week. It became about five to seven cigarettes a day. But it was a result we were satisfied with. And he even set a trend: friends of his also stopped vaping and switched to a more moderate cigarette diet.

Great success!

His biggest wish for 2025 is now: to quit smoking.

One step at a time, eh?

And so it happens that we are sitting next to each other again on a weekday evening, this time not in the car, but at home on the couch. Now I am in a mood and he is slightly irritated. We are waiting for a conversation with Sylvia Heddema, co-author of Stopping Vaping and a very experienced smoking cessation coach. When she hears his story, including failed attempts to quit, she reacts positively. ‘You are at least very aware and motivated. That is great. But quitting from one moment to the next, without preparation, purely on willpower, is very hard. There are ways to make quitting easier.’ Now she has my son's full attention. She points out the growing number of healthcare initiatives such as WeQuit or Medipro, which offer professional quitting programs that are specifically aimed at young people and that are reimbursed by health insurers.

This is starting to sound like an advertorial. I hope that’s all it is. I can’t bear the thought that this family exists. A grubby money-spinning grift would be much more palatable.

They consist of a series of video consultations, in combination with the use of nicotine replacements. ‘A coach will then determine exactly how much nicotine you inhale per day and which form would work best: patches, chewing gum or lozenges. These ensure that you suffer less from withdrawal symptoms when quitting, and that makes quitting easier.’

While Heddema continues talking, I notice that my son is getting restless. His friends are waiting for him outside and all that talk about cigarettes has made him want to smoke. After he has left the conversation, Heddema gives me one last piece of advice. Not: buy a pack of cigarettes for your son. But: ‘Parents think that they don’t have much influence, that teenagers don’t hear them, but the opposite is true. Keep telling them: I don’t want you to vape or smoke. And see if you can register him with WeQuit as soon as possible.’

Hmm, still sounds a bit like an advert.

The day after the conversation, I find my son and a friend happily sitting outside on a bench, smoking in the sun. Yes, sorry, they are smoking again, but hey, they are still young. Quitting vaping, they've already succeeded. Who's going to stop them? Now they just need to quit smoking. They'll do that soon, together. But for now, they're just going to enjoy it.

That’s the spirit!

PS. Readers of my other blog will fondly recall the Australian doctor who got his son off vapes by giving him cigarettes. I don’t know about you, folks, but the asteroid can’t come too soon.