‘It’s 10 Times Harder to Stop’: An Employee’s Vaping Struggle

How Brandy Palmer quit vaping through Duke’s employee wellness program, LIVE FOR LIFE

A vaping pen is shown held by a hand.
According to Quit at Duke, Duke Cancer Institute’s tobacco cessation program, about 14% of patients treated from January through September 2024 were using e-cigarettes exclusively or with another tobacco product. Photo courtesy of Unsplash

Even before Brandy Palmer was born, tobacco was a part of her life. Her father’s family were tobacco farmers in Kentucky, and she grew up in North Carolina surrounded by more of the same crop and its products. It’s no surprise she started smoking when she was a teenager.

By the time Palmer, a Staff Assistant in Facility Operations, was approaching 40 a couple years ago, she was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Still, she wanted to quit, so in March 2022, she decided to stop.

And she took up vaping, instead.

Soon, she was vaping even more than she had been smoking.

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“Pretty much all day, every day,” Palmer said. “They’re so accessible. They're in your pocket all the time and when you’re vaping, nobody notices if it smells like strawberries. I was struggling even more. It’s 10 times harder to stop.”

Palmer said she switched to vaping because she thought it was healthier than smoking cigarettes. That’s a common misconception, said Esther Granville, Programs Manager for LIVE FOR LIFE, Duke’s employee wellness program.

According to a CDC study, 99% of e-cigarettes sold in the United States contain nicotine, which is both addictive and harmful to lungs. And Granville says many who vape develop the same habit Palmer did – near continual use of the device.

“The amount of nicotine that you’re able to consume when you’re vaping is a lot higher than with cigarettes,” said Granville, who leads LIVE FOR LIFE’s tobacco cessation program.

Quit with Duke’s tobacco cessation resources

According to Quit at Duke, Duke Cancer Institute’s tobacco cessation program, about 14% of patients treated from January through September 2024 were using e-cigarettes exclusively or with another tobacco product. LIVE FOR LIFE’s tobacco cessation program uses the same methodology as Quit at Duke, which treats about 6,000 patients from the public per year and is also available as a resource for staff and faculty.

A woman holds a tall plastic cup with a straw
Brandy Palmer holds her "emotional support sippy cup" that helped her quit vaping. Photo courtesy of Brandy Palmer

Duke University has been a tobacco-free campus since 2020, mirroring the designation Duke Health had since 2007, and the American Cancer Society designates the third Thursday of November (Nov. 21 in 2024) as the Great American Smokeout, a “day to start your journey to a smoke-free life.”

Granville says LIVE FOR LIFE’s tobacco treatment specialists work closely with employees and dependents over the course of a year to develop a plan that will be most effective at kicking a tobacco habit. That could include low-cost nicotine replacement therapy (including patches, gum or lozenges) or medication (such as Chantix) to ease withdrawal symptoms.

“Oftentimes they're going to have a few weeks where they're just preparing themselves to quit,” Granville said. “Maybe they're removing tobacco products from certain areas of their house or doing things that are just going to mentally get them ready.”

It’s always a personalized plan tailored to the individual. Palmer said her work with specialists included moving to no-nicotine vapes, setting a timer for an increasing span of hours when she wouldn’t vape and one creative change to begin using what she called her “emotional support sippy cup.” Any time Palmer craved vaping, she’d take a sip of strawberry-flavored water – the same flavor of vapes she preferred – from the straw in her sippy cup.

“Which A., thumbs up for hydration and B., just the sucking on the straw with the strawberry flavor would trick my mind into thinking it was like a vape and that would just help me through that,” Palmer said.

Expect setbacks, but value progress

Along the way, Palmer learned that she didn’t respond well to setting a hard deadline to quit. But treatment specialists were encouraging, she said, in telling her, “This is your journey. There's no pressure, there's no deadline. Even mindfulness is progress.”

Granville says patients average at least five quit attempts before they’re successful.

Esther Granville

“The process of having a quit attempt and then relapsing is actually really normal,” Granville said. “Our tobacco treatment specialists are trained to work with people through that entire process.”

LIVE FOR LIFE’s tobacco cessation program works with about 100 to 150 people per year and has a 30% success rate, Granville said. That’s better than the 10% of successful quitters nationally, according to the CDC.

The last time Palmer vaped was Oct. 23, 2023, and the last time she smoked a cigarette was March 24, 2022. After she had been tobacco-free for six months, she was able to declare she was no longer a tobacco user, and $50 monthly surcharge on her medical insurance was removed.

“The most important thing is to just remember that there's no failures – there's only lessons,” Palmer said. “At the end of the day, if you're being mindful about it, that's already a success. Because once you want to do better, you're going to do better. If you tell yourself ‘no’ once a day, that's still better than you did yesterday.”

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