Having already achieved a rather impressive 2 pack a day plus habit by the ripe old age of twenty nine, I promised myself by thirty I would quit this vile habit.   And quit I did, for over seven years.   The hope was, and is, that with youth on my side and quitting by that age I could avoid most if not all of the disconcerting adverse health effects smoking evidently causes,  despite the heavy habit.   Of course it wasn’t as easy as all that and by no means did I quit nicotine altogether nor even tobacco, just smoking tobacco.  I started to quit using any and all means necessary to assuage the withdrawals and DT’s.  The body shock associated with cutting off the magical and religiously dosed vitamin-N influx is profound and necessitated for me;  ‘dip’, cigars (no inhale) and OTC NRT’s, being both The Patch and Nicorette gum to make this proposition realistic.  I realize the common anti feels a smoker should feel pain and suffer a bit but that’s why many people simply don’t quit and I was determined to make this work.

The transition wasn’t all bad and I credit Copenhagen especially for a comforting replacement, followed by cigars with Nicorette coming in a distant third.  The Patch didn’t, and has yet to, deliver nicotine in a satisfying way at all and I find it to be sorely lacking as an NRT, especially considering the price.   While the gum isn’t the most pleasant intake, at least it’s in a controllable dose form and doubling and tripling doses gives a satisfying boost, albeit outrageously expensive to continu…hello Canada!    For me at least, quitting smoking was going to necessitate copious amounts of Nicorette.   Yep, buying Nicorette in enough quantity to use it in a meaningful way is way too expensive a proposition in the US and Canadian pharmacies online did just the trick for about 1/2 the price, often less in bulk!   That’s one of the few good things I can say about Canada but I do believe in giving credit where it’s due (of course I’m joking as we all love our frozen friends up north).   I understand why Big Pharma’s charging so much as addicts have little choice but to pay these immoral fees but I’m quite sure they’re precluding multitudes by making NRTs so expensive.  In any case, fuck em, they’re as crooked as Big Tobacco with profit being these wolves in sheep’s clothing their only incentive.

As my 30th drew closer I was finding myself able to go longer and longer between smokes with Copenhagen being my primary crutch.  Drinking, as it turned out,  was a significant drawback as I can easily suck down a pack or more when imbibing.  I wasn’t going to let that drug foil my plans so simply quit drinking and somehow a year long sober was achieved much to my surprise, but that’s another story.  My 30th was turning out to be a cleansing period in my life.  Anyhow, I decided around one month before my b-day that cigars had to go too, at 6-10 bucks a pop and the added expense of the needed Nicorette,  I had to trim my quit smoking budget.   By B Day, I was easily able to substitute cigarettes with other forms of nicotine delivery and in fact my vitamin-N intake (and habit) was significantly increased.   I feel that’s the only successful way to quit smoking for the heavier users and unfortunately a strategy few doctor’s will condone.   I also feel that Nicorette, despite it’s poor track record of less than 10% success, can be an efficient NRT.

Big Pharma’s Nicotine Replacement Therapies biggest weaknesses are the expense and the recommended dosages being only a fraction of what’s needed for success, along with little pleasure and general low appeal.  In the last couple years though  Nicorette has released several promising flavors and consistencies but the stuff I used was hard and almost flavorless.   Nicorette should be advertised as more a replacement than a stop smoking aid, as it’s moniker Nicotine Replacement Therapy  actually implies.  This isn’t an aid to quit using nicotine in reality, just a healthier way to dose addicts with their beloved Drug of Choice.   This philosophy is scorned upon by  many so called “health experts” but these product’s effectiveness fell well below expectations.  They do nothing to cure the underlying addiction which is fantastically expected to just go away, well it doesn’t (ever).  Unfortunately, nicotine’s hold on user’s is purportedly stronger than even Heroin, a drug that oftentimes requires lifelong replacement treatment.   That anyone expects to cure nicotine with any less tenacity is unreasonable and ineffective.   Even today though, Nicorette and other NRTs are simply too expensive and unpleasant for many smokers to consider continued use, much less the primary addiction replacement.

Success using this replacement method was foolproof and surprisingly easy, the years ticked by and I eventually considered myself a non-smoker.    I had basically given up on the Copenhagen after a few years due to the paranoia of loosing teeth and the holes being burnt between my cheek and gums.  I was now only using Nicorette and enjoying a cigar or two a year.   I got to a point, as many reformed smokers do, of finding smoker’s as being less attractive people who  stunk.  I didn’t turn my nose at them in the least and many of my colleagues and companions smoked around me with no preaching nor disdain but the habit did bother me to an extent.   I was still an addict too though, and most likely had even increased my nicotine intake.  I can guesstimate that smoking 2 packs of Newports a day supplied me with about 60-70mg of nicotine.  I was using up to an entire box of Nicorette with 40 pieces of 4mg each to add to a grand total of 160mg a day!  This isn’t as bad as it sounds as the body uses inhaled nicotine much differently than orally, a more accurate comparison might be that I was using around 80mg a day as opposed to 60 or 70mg.   I did feel healthier to an extent but no major life-altering changes took place, I had never lost my sense of taste nor developed any breathing troubles.   Even a +two pack a day habit had seemingly little long term effects,  knock wood.

Still, I was satisfied that I could remain a non-smoker which gave me some comfort when considering aging and our bodies relative weaknesses in the latter years.   Whether or not one finds truth in the anti’s misconstrued rhetoric with smoking as The Deliverer  of uncompromising suffering and death.   I doubt anyone will disagree that a seventy year old body could have trouble effectively dealing with the added burden of a lifelong cigarette habit.

Then life caught up with me, seven years as a non-smoker spoiled when the near death of a child put me in the hospital’s smoker’s court once too often for my own good.    Ah well, at least I know it can be done again, and that was 4 years ago.   I just wonder if I’m any healthier now for having avoided inhaling those seven years of inhaling smoke?