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Quitting Smoking

Joe_Roberts
Community Member

I'm not saying this will work for you, but it worked for me. I smoked up to fifty cigarettes a day for thirty odd years. I wanted to quit, but the problem in my honest opinion was everyone said it was so hard to quit. You had to use nicotine patches, chew nicotine gum, or get a prescription. None of these things appealed to me. Nicotine Replacement Therapy? How's that supposed to work? If I told you I drank two bottles of hard spirits a day, would you tell me to cut down my drinking by switching to beer? I might even try that, if you supplied the beer ...

The problem arises when addiction is viewed as a disease. It isn't. Addiction is a matter of choice. All right, it's a series of bad choices if you like, but choice still isn't disease. OK, in my case, I had, for reasons best known to myself, chosen to pay a tobacco company to kill me. As long as that remained my choice, there wasn't much outside of death that would make me quit smoking. When that was no longer my choice, if I remember rightly, I simply shoved my cigarettes in a cupboard. They are still there. 

Why? Basically, "Waste not, want not!"  If I'm out somewhere and I think to myself, "I'll have to go buy a packet of smokes," another thought occurs to me, and that's this, "Don't be stupid, you've got a packet sitting in a cupboard!" That's true, and it's also true I could smoke the bloody lot right now if I wanted, but it's not how I would feel before I smoked any of them, it's how I'd feel afterwards!

Regards,

Joe


3 Replies 3

S_A_D_
Community Member

Cigarettes contain nicotine, nicotine is highly addictive, addiction is a form of physiological and psychological dependence. The absence of that which you depend on makes you ill, so quitting cigarettes makes you ill, and continuing to smoke cigarettes is also making you ill. If you are ill with them, and ill without them, then you are ill (tautology). therefore, cigarettes make you ill (hypothetical syllogism). Illness and disease are synonymous, therefore smoking is a disease.

This is an example of fallaciously facetious logical argument.

geoff
Champion Alumni
Champion Alumni

dear Joe, both my sons smoke rollies, and the promise they keep saying is 'I will quit, xmas time, next birthday when my daughter turns one, or even when my baby is born', never happens.

Just like we said to ourselves years ago, I won't get emphysema, it will never happen to me, and it doesn't even matter if they see someone who is critically ill with an oxygen mask on, it doesn't sink in, they all believe that they are immune to sickness or emphysema of any type. Geoff.

Angeldove
Community Member

Hy Joe,

I need to give up smoking, I can't afford it as I'm on a pension.  It seems I have an addictive personalty.  Addicted to smokes, alcohol and poker machines.  Seems I'm a mess.  I've no idea what to do.  Any help appreciated.