Poll: for Smokers who have Successfully Become Non Smokers, How Did You Do It?

In My Humble Opinion
81

[QUOTE=Kiwi Fruit]

I had smoked a pipe for nearly 30 years, after 5 years or so on cigarettes. Couldn’t really stand cigarettes as they made my mouth really dry. A packet of pipe tobacco is now more than $50 so I can’t see me starting again. Each year the tax on tobacco goes up, making smoking really expensive to keep up and, we hope, too expensive for young people to start.
[/QUOTE]

I was re-reading the thread I linked to above that I wrote in April 2007, not quite 5 years ago. I referred to cigarettes costing $3.50 per pack. Today if any store sold them for that every smoker in the city would be going there; ~$5.00 is a good price, $5.50 is more common, and if you go to a tiny store or- Og forbid- a hotel gift shop kind of place- don’t be surprised at $7.00 or more.
I can remember paying under $2.00 in the early 1990s. That was twenty years ago but even so, salaries haven’t tripled in that time any more than they’ve doubled since '07, and I understand the U.S. is one of the cheaper countries to buy cigarettes. (A Filipino student informs me they cost about $1 per pack in the Philippines, but I’m guessing that’s a very different quality of tobacco.)

82

$5.00?!
I was just at the drugstore and they want $8.50

83

I gave up smoking on 3rd January 1979 and haven’t smoked a single cigarette since. I know that, beyond the first few cough inducing puffs, I’d be totally hooked again if I did.

I don’t think nicotine patches or gum were around then, so it was cold turkey for me. I do believe I was a tad irascible* for about three weeks.

  • the expression ‘bitch on wheels’ was muttered once or twice.
84

I quit by a combination of things: patches, a quit support group, a reward (if we manages to quite for 6 weeks we were taken out for a free dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town) plus the fact that smokes were hugely expensive.

85

I am a huge Allen Carr fan. :slight_smile:

OH btw, on the fourteenth it will be four years!

86

They were a dollar higher in New Orleans over Christmas (though that might have been because it was a touristy store). Local taxes make a big difference.

That said, a sad/funny thing is I’ve heard lots of people say "When they get to __ I'm quitting", and __ comes and stays for a while then the price rises again and they’re still smoking.

It’s astounding to me how little non-smokers understand of the smoker psychology. The stupidest thing a place can do, and I’ve worked two places that did this, is take away ashtrays; this does NOT encourage anybody to quit, it just means that you’re going to have cigarette butts everywhere. I once worked at a college that did this- yeah, teenagers are going to be shamed into quitting smoking or else they’ll act responsibly and walk two blocks to an ashtrash; that place put some ashtrays back when a butt caught some dry twigs (being used for mulch) on fire.

I have wondered how well non-smoking campuses work, because I find it hard to believe that
1- They fired all the smokers (which would be stupid since some are probably among the best employees]
2- They’d expel a paying student (for those who’ve never worked in an admissions office, for every Harvard or Princeton turning down most applicants there are a dozen schools going after students like demons after souls)
3- Nobody ever smokes on them
Anyone know? (My guess would be there are very limited and out-of-view smoking places, but I don’t know this.)

87

If we can include hospital grounds as “campuses”, we tend to do it by posting signs threatening fines and telling security no one can smoke on the grounds. Security guards will, if they see you, tell you that you need to move across the street off hospital property. There are generally one or two deep hidey holes in the larger campuses, out of sight of patients, visitors and (most importantly) administration, where you can sometimes sneak a puff, though. Usually they’re by the back up generators or external oxygen storage tanks.

The only hospital I know that still allows smoking on grounds is the VA. (You try telling 10,000 veterans they can’t smoke.) They have large well marked areas with lots of ashtrays and even bench seating for the smokers.

88

Cold turkey, first time trying, been 6 months and so far no setbacks. Started around 18, currently 34.

I had cut down to 5 to 7 a day before I even attempted to quit. I think that’s a pretty good strategy to start. I don’t think I could have went from 20 to 0 without tripping up along the way, but, going from 5 to 0 is doable.

Best of luck.

89

I work in a hospital and did so way back when I was a smoker. It’s astounding how far things have changed. When I was training, patients used to have ashtrays on their bedside lockers and staff were allowed to smoke in the staff dining room. We just took it for granted but it must’ve been foul for the non-smokers.

By the time I got to the hospital where I was working when I eventually gave up, smoking was no longer allowed in the dining room but it was still allowed in all the outside areas, including outdoor eating areas.

We no longer have Repatriation Hospitals (they were the equivalent, I guess, of VA hospitals) - all have been subsumed under the various State Departments of Health, so ex-Diggers have to follow the same non-smoking rules as everyone else. I think smoking is still allowed in Psych Hospitals, though. Smokes were provided to the patients when I last worked in Mental Health and I wouldn’t be surprised if they still are being supplied.

90

Sampiro, good luck with the book. It did nothing for my SO to give up. She did it cold turkey when she wanted to.

Book was not around when I gave up- I thought that is enough and stopped.

Best of luck with whatever method suits.

91

I started with the nic patches but once they ran out, I still had a raging nic addiction and went back to smoking again after having quit for 30 days. Then, I visited a quit smoking website (can’t remember which one right now but shouldn’t be hard to find) and it had before and after pictures of a healthy looking 30-something man and a month later he appeared as a skeleton covered with skin from the cancer.

That and other stories of young people losing their lives to smoking convinced me to quit right then and there. This, after LOVING smoking and smoking a pack a day plus for 13 years and, really, not wanting to quit but knowing that I should. Usually when attempting a quit before, I would finish the last pack, every last cigarette that I had around, even lighting up old butts that I could dig out of the garbage when the nic craving would start to get to me. After seeing those pictures, I crumpled up the pack that I was smoking. I also thought, as a tribute to those people, to give those people’s deaths meaning, I would quit in their name.

Now what seemed to help me in addition to that was to drink yurba mate tea. I kept a hot cup of that tea near me at all times. Also, I began to eat a very healthy, whole foods diet. I began to feel so much better and was so much more productive with my time (instead of spending 3 hours a day on my back porch smoking) that I would not even consider going back to smoking.

In addition to that, I began playing guitar and taking lessons. I pursued something that I loved and have been devoting my time to that. I spend what I used to spend on cigarettes (about $150.00 per month) on the lessons and guitar stuff.

So, that is all what worked for me. A combination of different things but, as much as I loved smoking, I would not go back to it. I feel so free to be away from that as it does enslave you. I don’t have to run out for cigs anymore or worry whether I have enough or leaving social gatherings to go have a smoke and, best of all, feeling good and accomplishing something with my time that I feel is worthwhile.

My very best wishes for your permanent success with quitting. Try the tea–I really think it worked for me as well as eating more veggies/protein and cutting down on caffeine. I used to drink about 3 pots of coffee a day as well and I find that I just don’t have the taste for it as I used to when I smoked. This has also saved me a lot of money as I drank the primo stuff.

Also, wait until you see how much energy you have once you quit and how much more enthusiasm you will get back for life. It does take a while–about 2-3 months for the good effects to return so be patient with that. And, be KIND to yourself! Give yourself extra rewards and buy/do things just for you. Be selfish until you shake the demon–you deserve it!

92

I quit in 1987 after smoking more than a pack a day for 10 years (started in high school). It was relatively easy, which leads me to believe I never had a physical nicotine addiction. The #1 thing that helped me was to hang out with NONsmokers. No peer pressure or social triggers and poof, no intense cravings.

Even while I was smoking, there would be smoke-free days after party weekends. I’d wake up on Monday and my lungs hurt, so I’d just not smoke. It was one of these episodes that led me to quit–it was a Wednesday and I mentioned to a friend that I hadn’t smoked yet that week. She said, hell, if you can do that why not just quit altogether? So I did.

It’s the absolute very best thing I ever did for my health, no question. Even losing huge amounts of weight didn’t result in the immediate improvement in my well-being as getting my sense of smell back, being able to take deep breaths without coughing, and realizing how awful I must have smelled all the time.

Good luck with it!!

93

It’s been about five years. For me it was necessary to seperate the habit from the chemical addiction. I used the gum for about four months exactly as if I were smoking. By that time smoke smelled bad to me, and the reaching for a smoke habit was gone. The physical addiction slowly dropped away ntil I was using the gum almost never for the next two years.

I don’t think the gum is any better than any other option, I just found that losing the habit first was helpful.

I still keep the gum around for those relapse moments, to keep me from picking up a cigarrette. The last two years have been incredibly, impossibly, indescribably stressful, and I guess I’ve used the gum about 15 times, usually biting off half a piece because at this point any more makes me nauseous.

Good luck!

94

Cold turkey, but it wasn’t willpower. I have no willpower. It was about my third or fourth attempt to give up, and I think I was just fed up with the whole rigmarole of being a smoker, considering the basically neglible thrill that you get from what, let’s face it, must be the world’s least exciting narcotic. So that last time, I just stopped smoking and didn’t look back. No cravings, the occasional “ex-smoker’s dreams” that many people report, but that was it. That was many years ago now.

95

Heck, I just barely remember going with my grandmother to her doctor’s office, where the doctor politely offered her a cigarette before lighting one for himself while he talked to her after her exam! :smiley:

96

I remember ashtrays in hospital rooms too. Also in grocery stores- they used to have ashtrays at the end of every other aisle, and there was a used book store I loved here in town that looked like a Southern Gothic set designed by Tim Burton with weird angles and stacks of old books to the ceiling and, in spite of the tons and tons of dry old paper, ashtrays (the old woman who ran the place and who could tell you instantly, no matter how obscure the book, whether she had it/how much it was/etc., was a chain smoker). And of course most restaurants started off by having a “non smoking” section, then went from that to having a smoking section, then became smoke free.

97

My freshman year in college, you could still smoke anywhere on campus but ashtrays were few and far between except in the lounges and cafeteria. Mostly people would cluster around open windows to smoke inside the buildings and stub their butts out in the windowsills. So there were these beautiful stained glass windows with the sills covered with ash and butts. The bathrooms were a mess because the sinks and toilets got used as ashtrays.

Sophomore year they banned smoking in the buildings, so the students would smoke just outside and toss their butts up on the roof (most of the doorways had those little roof extensions over them, dont’ know the technical term) resulting in gutters full of butts and butt-drifts where the extensions joined onto the buildings.

After that they wisened up and put those outdoor ashtrays with the sand in them by all the doors, but throwing butts onto the roof had become a tradition :smiley:

As for how well the smoking inside ban worked… it didn’t. Some of the faculty went right on smoking in their offices, and one of the biology professors was never seen without a cup of coffee in one hand and a smoke in the other (except the time when he was wandering down the hall with a lit smoke and a can of ETHER.

After I graduated, Pennsylvania adopted stricter anti-smoking laws where you’re not allowed to smoke inside a public building, and supposed to smoke within 30(?) feet of the entrance to any public building. Every place I’ve worked or spent much time in since then, however, enforces the inside but not the outside so there’s still little clumps of people right outside the door smoking away.

98

One of the biggest hospitals around here just announced that it will no longer hire nicotine users at all. That doesn’t cover current employees though, so I’m sure they’ll be sneaking smokes like nothing changed.

99

Smoked 15 years, quit 2 years ago.

I cut down significantly, down to just 1 or 2 a day, then one day I lit one up, took one puff, and decided I really didn’t want the rest of it anymore and put it out. That was the last one.

100

I’m right around that 20 pack year part on one side or the other; I started smoking around 1988 (when I was 21- that actually works in my favor a bit according to some things I’ve read, for the younger you started the more damage and the harder to quit), smoked a little under a pack a day for a few years, a little over a pack a day for a few years, almost religiously a pack a day for the last few, and quit for a bit over 3 years, so I’m right around there. In any case, one reason I’m quitting is that I don’t think I’m quite to “The Point of No Return” healthwise yet, but it’s in the next few stations; I can really feel the effects of it, and while currently I only have breathing problems except when I do cardio or some other strenuous exercise bust, I can easily envision having them not that far down the road.

I also need to lose about 50+ pounds. I recognize that stopping smoking will probably make me gain weight initially, but I still think it’s what I have to do first. For one thing, as mentioned above I have a hard time doing cardio- I can do it a lot easier once I quit smoking. For another, I’ve known a lot more fat 85 year olds than I have smoking 85 year olds. Yet another, I need the ego/self-esteem boost of “I stopped smoking”, which doesn’t take as long as losing 50+ lbs, but can help with it.