Studies on successful long-term quitters, people who quit and stayed quit — had identified a consistent pattern that the industry has never acted on.

The people who succeeded were almost never the ones who suffered through withdrawal the hardest. They were the ones who found something to replace the ritual with.

One Australian ex-smoker, in a widely cited behavioural study described it so plainly it should have changed the entire industry's approach: "It confirmed to me it was just all habit. I don't actually need a cigarette. It's just the motion of going to my mouth."

Because the real cause of failure is the unmet behavioural need in trigger situations, the solution must meet that need with something that breaks the habit rather than feeding it. A device that satisfies and mimicks the hand-to-mouth motion, the oral fixation, the ritual of the inhale and exhale without nicotine or any other chemical that creates or transfers dependency.

But here is what angered me most about this discovery.

The research establishing this mechanism has existed for years. The behavioural replacement concept is not new. The reason no major pharmaceutical company has built a serious product in this category is straightforward: a product that actually solves the problem doesn't generate ongoing chemical dependency. It works and then people stop buying it. That is a catastrophic business model for companies built on recurring nicotine sales. So the category was left to small independent operators, most of whom failed in execution. Vapour-producing devices that mimicked vaping instead of breaking it. The concept was right. The execution wasn't good enough.