Why not just ban the sale of tobacco? At least cigarettes. Smoking tobacco does the most harm to individuals and society. Make people grow their own.
We know it’s addictive as hell. People will smoke through their tracheostomy tube. It’s a little worse than a simple personal choice issue.
I think it’s highly immoral to raise the price of something you know people can’t simply quit. If we’re going to use scary pictures, we need to put those scary pictures all over the office walls of every politician who has any say in the matter.
Plaster them all over society too, so the voters - not just the smokers - can be reminded constantly what they are allowing.
I quit when I was in the hospital for three days and they gave me morphine.
I figured if I could make three days I’d be good.
Offer a tax break for smokers to let themselves be locked up for three days and do drugs under adult supervision.
I seriously think that the only thing that will make me quit is playing in traffic on a busy freeway. I also think quitting something like this is more due to habit (for me) than nicotine addiction. It’s a strange animal. All you’re doing is NOT doing something. To accomplish this, you do nothing, but doing that nothing drives you so batshit crazy, I might end up voting for Palin.
Ah yes, we’ve had some of that humour here as well. “Pack of Marlboros please. Gimme one of those that cause birth defects, I’m not planning on getting pregnant, har har har”.
No, I haven’t, and I don’t intend to ever have the opportunity to, either. But there’s certainly precedent that it’s possible. Really, I think it does folks a far greater disservice to say that they can’t quit than to say that they can.
I’ve gotta say, anecdotally, BS on that – I’d rape the shit out of some scabrous beast for a pack of cigs, if it came to that. It gets in your head, man. I guess for some more serious problems, like DTing from alcohol, it might be a problem, but for cigs, when you can still function at a high level as an addict, that’s a powerful motivator with minimal immediately-perceptible side effects. Bad juju.
I’ve done it. I’ve done it several times actually (as Mark Twain’s joke goes), but I’ve done it twice for real. The first time I quit for 12 years. Then one night I stupidly thought I could handle one or two heaters for old times sake during a night of drinking with my brother-in law. I ended up right back onto a pack of day habit (which I idiotically thought I was keeping a secret from my wife) for about a year. I quit again, and this time I’ve been nicotine free for four years and counting.
The tough thing about quitting smoking isn’t really the quitting itself. It takes 72 hours to detox, and then the worst cravings end (that three days is no walk in the park, but it’s nothing compared to the withdrawal from heroin or even alcohol), it’s the availability afterwards. Cigarettes are so damn easy to get a hold of, and they’re so damn tempting when you see other people smoking. I still get little twinges, even after years of not smoking, when I see somebody light up. I’m actually getting twinges just writing about it. I think people that quit hard drugs always get those twinges too, but the difference is that I could drive down to the store and get a pack of smokes for 4 bucks right now if I wanted, and it would be perfectly legal. The relapses are so much easier with cigarettes, that it’s the staying off that’s hard. Most of the time, never even think about it, but when I do think about it, I think about it.
