Placebo can be demonstrated to be effective with various drugs and medicines, it creates the illusion of drug consumption to the consumer, but weirdly enough with the same wanted effects. For example There are two groups of people, group A will receive normal 5% beer and group B will drink an alcohol free variant of the same beer. Non of the participants can distinguish between the two beers, which was a requirement for the experiment. After an hour the scientists had the two groups do the typical 'are you drunk' tests and remarkable results showing that the group consuming alcohol free beer acted as if they were drunk. In fact they felt drunk. The cool thing about this is that we can imply this on our smoking/nicotine addiction by setting up similar conditions:
two bottles not labelled, one with nicotine the other not. Both are identical in taste and throat hit, but one is zero nicotine the other is not.
Now simply give it to some person and ask him to keep the bottles for an hour in his pocket. pick up the two bottles and forget about them for a while. When you feel the urge to vape take out a bottle and vape away. I am hoping though the placebo effect one will not be able to tell the difference between the two bottles, if one does not concentrate too hard on it. The problem being that the throat hit and taste must be identical or the same.
It would be great if you could try this out and post your findings in this method. Thanks!