What is it about cigarettes? Blows me away how we can grasp the enormity of our other addictions, go cold turkey, flush the white powders down the toilet, shake and shiver, get a bad sick on, vomit all over the house, look in the mirror rheumy eyed and watch the snot run out of our nostrils, hack up a lugie the size of an oyster and later, after the shaking is done, shuffle white-faced out the door, balance carefully on the porch railing, and gingerly find our way into some twelve step meeting.

Cigarettes always get a pass. Hell, AA meetings run on coffee and cigarettes. Urging a friend to quit smoking is some kind of sissy vegan thing. I had my last cigarette over twenty years ago, a year to the day after I had my last intoxicant. I quit by treating cigarettes like any other drug. The choice was use that shit or abstain. Somehow when we quit nicotine the tendency is to find an easy and soft way, a tapering off. But there is no easier, softer way than immediate total abstinence, no matter how shitty you feel or how long you feel that way. Heroin addicts will tell you it’s easier to kick junk than it is to kick tobacco. Chewing gum and nicotine lozenges are poor substitutes for sucking down a big lungful of that delicious first smoke of the day. What they do is keep you ready for that next cigarette, feed the need for nicotine and never let you quit. I think if you’re quitting, you should quit, and I think if you’re dying you should quit, and if you’re smoking you’re dying, whether you know it yet or not.

[tags]cigarettes, cigarettes make you sick, cold turkey, mucous[/tags]