I can only highly suggest it.
When you buy nicotine base from now illegal sources, you can essentially get 3 years worth for 100 Euros while the same amount of shots would easily go into the thousands.
I bet it cut into their earnings to a large enough degree, in my old office in ~2010 back when I started vaping it was the most heaviest smoker that would visit the smokers lounge in a 20 minute rhythm that first started it off.
That guy burned through at least 2 packs per day and first was only smiled upon about his new "electronic cigarette", still one of those early stick battery pen vapes.
But after giving it a second thought, a lot of other smokers got a starter kit themselves, myself included and some just stuck at it, as the cough went away and cost decreased drastically.
Also don't underestimate how many people were able to slowly fade out nicotine from the juice and then quit the habit altogether, something that hardly ever comes up in official discussions, they still want to sell their shitty nicotine gum and adhesives.
And as I said, the market was run by vapers themselves, lots of small businesses that eventually started to developed more advanced vapes that catered to the communities needs and wishes.
Especially those small businesses got smashed without mercy by EU regulations, as so often before, they made things prohibitively expensive to enter the market at a small scale and they already had to struggle with cheap Chinese copies of products they initially developed and produced locally.
You can see the same thing happening in gastronomy for example.
