I smoked pipe in 6th grade, but it never took and I didn’t even finish the can of tobacco. I’ve been around enough people trying to quit (some for the umpteenth time) to know what a struggle it is.

I don’t smoke, never have - and ever since LA has been smoke-free, it has been so nice to go out to eat and not have to a) wait for a table in the ‘smoke free section’ and b) curse the fact that the HVAC system doesn’t know to keep the smoke on the smoker’s side.

Anyway, kudos for kicking the habit. As with any addiction, getting it under control can be tough. You might check out Nicotine Anonymous as another tool in the ‘quit smoking’ toolbox.

My grandfather on my father’s side smoked all his life after the Navy, and died at 94.  My parents both smoked all through my childhood and young adult life.  They quit in their early sixties.  My father passed away of heart failure at only 65, my mother is still going strong at 79.  Pretty sure her mother never smoked and she is still griping about GW Bush at 98.

Nicotine was my drug of choice in college but living in East Tennessee put me in close proximity to a wonderful tobacconist where I could blend my own pipe tobaccos.  That is a way of smoking well-suited to studying but not to working on your feet and I just didn’t have time to smoke after college.  Now I smoke an occasional cigar.

I smoked seriously from about 15 to 60. I had a year off in the early 90s.
I’ll never have the courage to say I’ll never smoke again cos I know how insidious nicotine is.

(I smoked dope from about 20 to 60 with nearly 10 years straight during the 80s and early 90s
The idea of THC still interests me but not necessarily what it could do for me in the future but more to recapture what it did for me in the past. If you don’t understand, don’t worry about it – it’s all psycho stuff.)

I have to admit I’ve done the giving-up-smoking easy (as I recently mentioned somewhere else).
If it’d been hard I dunno if Ida got thru it.
For those who don’t know, I’d been saying for a few years that if I made to my 60th birthday I’d stop mainly cos I had trouble breathing and my wheezing at night ‘worried me’.
That sounds a bit crazy cos the idea of living hadn’t really interested me much for many years.
I was well aware I was doing the passive suicide thing.

So I got to 60 on New Year’s Day and decided to follow thru with the idea of stopping; the main reason being that I decided I wanted to live … I haven’t decided how much longer yet but I’m liking it so far.
It’s like I turned over a new leaf into a new freedom within a new life.
It’s rather liberating.

I don’t care who smokes around me; my mate visits and I bring the ashtray inside for him to use and he smokes in my car as well; I honestly do not care … I insisted he not change his habits to suit me.
I’d like him to stop but I know hassling him won’t work cos it never worked on me; his wife’s been hassling him for years and it hasn’t dented his resolve.
So I just set the example, the standard and stick to my game.
He’ll either change or not.

My deciding not to smoke is a personal choice and in this instance I don’t need the world to change to suit me which is really handy cos I know it won’t.
I hope I never turn into one of those fanatical ex-smokers although I must admit I feel a bit sorry for those who are still stuck in the rut even though I know how hard it is to escape.
The only way to stop is to decide to stop. (I know how silly that sounds)
That’s all it takes but I know the drug has such a hold that it convinced me I loved it for years … just as the heroin addict is convinced he loves the drug as he watches his life [sic] walk out on him.

I smoke Marlboro Lights.

I haven’t smoked for about 7 years, not since high school.  I have no desire to pick one up.  Strangely though when I am with a group of friends or at some social setting I see people smoking and something peeks my interest.

I do not know why, cause I think smoking is a filthy habit, and I do not care much for it at all.  But nonetheless there is still something that happens, and then I bring myself back to reality and say what the fuck was I thinking.  Maybe it’s all that subliminal advertising.

Congrats to LJ and Sadie, quitting is not difficult by any means and yours are definitely an example to follow.  Maybe I can get my girlfriend to quit and then all will be wonderful again.

I so glad I never took smoking up, I know I just wouldn’t be able to quit, just looking at the package I feel tempted by them, it is so odd. Congratulations Sadie, you won’t regret this, smoking related deaths are some of the most horrible ways to die, usually long and painfully.

I never took up the habit myself (thankfully, as all four of my grandparents died of cancer).  But I did want to pass along a big ol dollop of congrats. to SS and LJ.  If you can keep your family from going through what my Mom-in-law put hers through in the last two days of life, it’s worth it.  (Trust me:  You do NOT want to know the color/consistency of the stuff that’s pumped out of a cancer-rotted lung.  Neither does anyone who loves you.)

Keep going and good job!

Good luck, Sadie! Quitting smoking is a process, one that can take years until it finally “takes”.

I smoked 2-3 packs per day for 26 years. Every single photograph of me from the age of 14 to 40 shows me with a cigarette either dangling from my lips or jammed between my fingers. I smoked Marlboro “reds” in the “crush-proof” box for about 20 years, Marlboro Lights for 2 years, and Marlboro Ultra-Lights for 2 years.

I quit hundreds of times when I was in my 30’s. Quitting was easy . . . I’d crush the pack at around 11pm, and convince myself that THIS WAS IT. At 11am, I was gasping and driving myself to the gas station to get another carton.  Once I managed to make it 2 whole weeks before deciding I really just wanted to smoke. 

Around January 2000, my son came home from school and announced that he was afraid that I was going to die. He had seen a film at school about the dangers of smoking, and he asked me to please quit. I said “Yeah, sure. I’ll quit!“ - and of course, I continued smoking.

In September 2000, my son said “Dad, remember when you promised me you’d quit smoking? Are you ever gonna quit?“ I realized that I had made a promise to my kid, and now HE realized that I was a liar, and I was teaching him that it was okay to lie to people you love. That night, I got every pack of cigarettes laying around the house that I could find, and he opened them up and broke every single cigarette, one at a time.

I was lucky. For me, it was like someone turned off a switch - one day I smoked like a fiend, the next day I *didn’t*. I haven’t smoked for 6-1/2 years now, and I don’t miss it one bit.

I also put on 40 pounds of fat around my middle, quickly developed all kinds of stomach problems that kept me up all night, literally wanting to DIE until the doctor put me on Prilosec (excess stomach acid in a VERY bad way - it seems that smoking inhibits the production of stomach acid - who knew?), and my blood pressure, which had always been normal, shot thru the ceiling. Now, instead of money going to cartons of cigarettes, it goes to Prilosec and Dynacirc.

But I’d go thru all of that again just to be out of the clutches of nicotine. 

Sorry for the novel - but good luck! You can do it, and it *is* worth it, ultimately. 

At 23 I have never smoked in my life. But I have thought about picking up the pipe one more than one occasion in the last year.

Most people I know always say “Somethings gotta kill you” and due to the fact that none of my grandparents have lived much past 70 I am thinking that I might as well have fun while I am here! My only worry is that smoking might cut into my drinking time!

I also put on 40 pounds of fat around my middle, quickly developed all kinds of stomach problems that kept me up all night, literally wanting to DIE until the doctor put me on Prilosec (excess stomach acid in a VERY bad way - it seems that smoking inhibits the production of stomach acid - who knew?), and my blood pressure, which had always been normal, shot thru the ceiling. Now, instead of money going to cartons of cigarettes, it goes to Prilosec

It’s my long-lost TWIN BROTHER!

Your story sounds pretty much the same as mine, except I smoked Camels, and it was my girlfriend who wanted me to quit.

But the multiple tries, the weight gain and the entirely sleepless nights, until I went onto Prilosec, that all sounds -exactly- the same.

I smoke ultra lights but I’m currently trying to quit again. I’ve quit for as long as a year before and started back. It’s a stupid fucking crutch and it shames me to call myself a smoker, so I’ve got to quit for good this time. I’ve just got to.

My father smoked about 40 cigarettes a day for about 10 years. He quit cold turkey about 22 years ago and now he says he finds the idea of smoking repulsive. I personally have never been tempted to smoke as fortunately or unfortunately smoke (even second hand ) gives me asthma.
Good job LJ and SS.

Quite frankly, smoke of all kinds disgusts me and don’t get me started on asthma.

I started smoking when I was 14 years old and I think that I quit for good 7 years ago, when I was 43 years old.  I had earlier quit smoking twice for about a year each time, but I think that the third time was the charm.

I don’t smoke, but a lot of people at work do, they say it’s what the company does to you, good luck though

I never got hooked.  I like the smell of Marlboros, but gawd, I couldn’t STAND the aftertaste.  Not to mention being chronically short on cash was an incentive not to start.

I’ve always gotten my pick-me-up buzz off of caffine.  My goal nowadays is to keep the caffine out of the late afternoon/evenings.

Nicotine is one of the best neurostimulants (in terms of side-effect to benefit ratio) available.  It significantly improves cognitive function.  Only problem is that it’s addictive and the most common delivery mechanism has a lot of bad health effects. 

But many health messages come with a heaping helping of shame, which is counterproductive.  Shame isn’t particularly useful for self-improvement as it tends to stifle the sense of reward in small accomplishments.  “I feel so guilty I had a cheeseburger for lunch” and so forth.  If Buddha was right that existence is suffering then reward will always be more powerful than pain.

I am a firefighter in the Chicago land area. I do not smoke. Here in Northern Illinois there is a disturbing trend where the local governments are making smoking illegal. Some whole counties have actually made it illegal to smoke in public. I personlly find this to be wrong.

Thank you everyone for your input and your well-wishing. I wholeheartedly appreciate it. Brock, I wish you luck in your attempts to quit, and I congratulate all of you who have successfully quit.

DOF, you said:

But many health messages come with a heaping helping of shame, which is counterproductive.  Shame isn’t particularly useful for self-improvement as it tends to stifle the sense of reward in small accomplishments.

I agree completely. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is trying to avoid beating myself up whenever I am faced with temptation. It’s very hard at times to not label myself a “fucking idiot” whenever my heart races in response to the smell of smoke. To thus denigrate myself would be entirely counterproductive and only make an already tense situation worse. This is also why I consider much of the rhetoric of some anti-smoking campaigns to be, at best, misguided.

I consider much of the rhetoric of some anti-smoking campaigns to be, at best, misguided.

Probably not exactly misguided because the intention isn’t what you think.  Many of the campaigns are, after all, funded by tobacco companies as part of court settlements.  They know exactly what they are doing.

Now that I did not know.

Probably not exactly misguided because the intention isn’t what you think.  Many of the campaigns are, after all, funded by tobacco companies as part of court settlements.  They know exactly what they are doing.

Which to me is absolutly backwords. The idea of a company being forced to advertise against itself, is silly. I believe that every company has the right to advertise, to try and sell thier business, to try and make money.

And the consumer has the responcablity to choose, how they see fit.

The idea of a company being forced to advertise against itself, is silly.

Absolutely right.  Anti-smoking campaigns should be run by people who are actually against smoking.  Hopefully, with some notion of effective persuasion.

I believe that every company has the right to advertise, to try and sell thier business, to try and make money.

The maximum amount of tobacco that one can safely consume is very small because tobacco is toxic and causes extremely expensive health problems in the long run.  In our insurance-connected society, the expense of these health problems is widely spread, and is far higher than other risks.

  For tobacco companies to advertise their product as enhancing quality of life (which for some people, in very small doses, is true, but as a chronic habit is completely false) allows them to profit by externalizing the costs of that health care.  This ain’t cheeseburgers, this is poison. 

Libertarian view works out great for the tobacco companies, though.  For society, not so much.