Young Adults Don’t Want To Quit
By admin on Jun 8, 2009 in TidBits
A college student I know said while she was in Las Vegas she paid $8 for a pack of cigarettes. Another student regularly pays $6 a pack. College students don’t have much money, but they spend a fortune on cigarettes. I guess the ones who are considering quitting are doing so for financial reasons. Hooray for them. Whatever the reason to make them finally quit is a good one.
I almost quit when cigarettes got to 40 cents a pack. I finally kicked the habit when they reached $1. It was 1986 and I wanted to do something special for the Texas Sesquicentennial, when the state celebrated its 150th birthday. I quit on Jan. 5 and it was the smartest thing I have ever done. Smokers don’t realize what slaves they are to cigarettes. They plan every waking moment around smoking, making sure they have enough cigarettes and ways to light them.
I was ready to quit. When I smoked in the car, my wife would cover her face with a handkerchief and crack her window. That was sure discouraging. I remember once when I came home from work and my youngest son ran up to me to give me a hug. I was holding a lighted cigarette and he ran into it. Why I didn’t stop right then puzzles me to this day.
I smoked all kinds of tobacco: cigars, pipes, and foreign brands. I guess at one time or another I smoked every brand of cigarette on the market. Even Delicados, those flat cigarettes from Mexico.
Of course I had tried to quit several times. Once I quit for a year, then bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked all of them one evening. When I was determined to quit, I went to a stop-smoking clinic. It cost $180, which was then the price for six months of cigarettes. I figured I could at least quit for six months to get my money’s worth.
The class had a dozen people in it. It met every night for a week, then once a week for the next three weeks. We saw horrible pictures of smokers’ lungs. Everybody brought a new package of cigarettes with them. The first night we opened them and smoked five cigarettes in a row as fast as possible. I remember that exercise as being an ugly one. The cigarettes got so hot I could hardly put them in my mouth. After smoking the five cigarettes, we threw away the rest of the pack. The physical act of throwing away the cigarettes was an important step toward quitting.
What helped me more than anything was a card that the instructor passed out that first night. It had a simple sentence on it: “The urge to smoke a cigarette will go away whether or not you smoke a cigarette.” It sure worked for me. Every time I had the urge to smoke, I got out that card and read it. Sure enough, within minutes the urge left and soon the urge to smoke went away forever.
When I meet young people who smoke I tell them if they are ready to quit I have a sure cure for them. Most of them apparently aren’t ready to quit. I’m glad I did.
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