Cigarettes have an average of 12mg (between 8-20mg depending on brand) of Nicotine per cigarette. Your nicotine patches give out 15mg per day which is about the equivalent of 1 cigarette a day (and this is also for the first 4 weeks) thereafter the users switch to a lower patch which only gives about 5mg per day of Nicotine. Also your Nicotine gum only give on average about 2-4mg per gum of nicotine so as you can see the alternatives are a lot less and will be detected on a cotinine test as a lot lower
If you are vaping with non Nicotine liquids you are not going to detect nicotine at all therefore it will not be detected in the test but if you are vaping with Nicotine based liquids then it will be detected and as the chart shows below some of the nicotine based vapes are high in nicotine
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