This electronic cigarette phenomena is increasingly taking shape as a fairy tale with a less than happy ending.

Yes, the medical experts are starting to find that vaping ain’t what the vape manufacturers had it cracked up to be.

Inhaling nicotine fumes with a plethora of fruity flavors has been touted as a way to avoid the evils of burning tobacco. Stop smoking and start vaping, they said.

All of which, in my opinion, is a tub of tobacco industry horse shit with the fragrance of lilacs and petunias.

And now the maker of Marlboro tobacco cigarettes and other cancer sticks, a company called Altria, has sprung a new gadget on the tobacco addicted public called IQOS

The gadget tub thumpers say IQOS is less harmful than tobacco although it contains tobacco rather than liquid nicotine as in the vaping process.

The tobacco industry won’t back off, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just said it is investigating more than 150 potential cases of severe lung illness associated with vaping.

Don’t tell me about tobacco harm. Cigarettes gave me bladder cancer which I got rid of years ago, and my youngest son Steven died this past year with small cell lung cancer, a condition I choose to believe was brought on by his cigarette smoking habit.

I quit sucking on cigarettes over 20 years ago. I smoked up to two packs a day, drawing them down so short the ashes all but fell off behind my teeth. Then it took me another four or five years to finally quit dipping Copenhagen snuff. And all of this happened after I finally gave up alcohol and drugs in 1989.

When I met my wife Sharon I was mainlining the tobacco into my system with the Copenhagen. How she put up with it as long as she did is a mystery today. I slept with the snuff in my mouth, swallowing the overflow juice,

I hit bottom with the Copenhagen one Easter Sunday morning. When I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I found my pillow tightly glued to my beard with dried Copenhagen runoff.

Substitutions and switching of the poisons never works.

Musician Ray Wylie Hubbard and I once decided that cocaine might be an answer to our drinking problem. Wrong!

Nothing worked until we quit it all.

Switching from alcohol to dope and back to alcohol is, for alcoholics like us, akin to switching seats on the Titanic. We were bound for a watery grave until we quit it all.

An old recovered drunk I knew famously proclaimed: The way you quit drinking is you quit drinking!

And I truly believe that the only way to quit smoking is to quit smoking. And I also know that Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.