Not smoking is a real drag
by Vaughan Lovell
I am a smoker.
Yep, a dirty, filthy, reviled creature who lurks in wind-less corners in the winter, puffing on cigarettes which contain more harmful ingredients than a molotov cocktail.
So I tried to quit just recently, and it went absolutely great - that is if you make money from tobacco sales.
I have never really tried to quit smoking before. In fact, I had never even really considered myself addicted to the wretched chunks of smokey delight until I thought that I might benefit from trying to quit.
To be honest, I suspected I was addicted.
But I never knew what it would be like to go through the withdrawal phase that one enters when they attempt to wean themselves off some nasty chemical reaction inside their body, one which makes them wince in pain without their beloved vice.
Nicotine, needless to say, currently has the upper hand in my fight for survival. Though, I guess I am not exactly fighting if I am smoking am I?
It seems a dilemma which has been talked about since whenever it is they decided that smoking wasn’t such a great idea to prescribe, both in a medical and advertising sense.
You see, the thing about being a smoker is the very nature of the addiction- the nicotine gets into your brain and tells you that you gotta get your fix, man.
The trouble is that for me personally, this provides me with an excuse to keep smoking. It goes something like “I’m not addicted to smoking, its the nicotine. I could stop any time I want to I reckon.”
Oh, how wrong I was then.
I went for about 36 hours without a cigarette.
Partly, this was an enforced situation as I am a broke student without the means to blow away about a quarter-of-a-mortgage deposit’s worth of money each year on smokes, yet somehow, like any good addict, I always find a way.
So for a day I sat around, not really thinking too much about smoking, and telling myself that if I go for a day then why not try three days? A week? A month? Forever!? This could have been my salvation from emphysema. Sadly, ’twas not.
You see, to my surprise also, I was pretty angry when Sunday rolled around and I rolled out of bed rolling my eyes at my lack of roll-your-own tobacco. I longed to have a cigarette, I had rollies on the brain, and would probably have done some pretty undignified things to get my hands on some if I didn’t get my nicotine fix quickly.
To cut a long story short, I decided to get onto my old friend Visa, and transfer ten dollars to satisfy my needs.
I began to smile from ear to ear as I plunged further into debt in order to get something that would kill me eventually.
There are so many juxtapositions as a smoker, as an addict; albeit a pretty small-time one.
However, my experience of 36 hours without a cigarette did actually shock me.
More than the imminent warnings of death, pregnancy horrors and bad breath issues, what really surprised me was the Gollum-like behaviour which enveloped me until I could get my precious, precious tobacco.
I am a filthy, dirty, reviled creature, just like Gollum, after all.
I am a smoker.
I gave up. Sorry. I know that doesn’t help. In fact, there’s little worse than the smarmy ex-smoker telling you how he did it, when you’ve just failed yourself to do it. But I’m going to . . . forget the patches, forget the hypnosis and the books guaranteed to make you stop. The trick is twofold - firstly you need to want to stop (yeah, I know . . . that old one) and secondly (and this is the real trick) you need to be honest with yourself about a little piece of knowledge which all smokers know but won’t face up to. . . and that is withdrawal from nicotine addiction is a pain and, like all pain, it goes away if you’re patient enough. At first the pain is 25 times a day but only for about three minutes. Just wait out that three minutes. The following week, the pain is about 10-15 times a day but still for only three minutes at a time. Within a month or two it’s down to three or four times a day. After six months it’s once a week. I gave up in 2001 and I still get that pain . . . about once a year. And all I have to do is wait three minutes. It’s not a long time. You can hate me if you like.