[caption id="attachment_328" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="But For The Grace Of God Go I"]
[/caption]
Today is my 68th month without a cigarette. That's five years and eight months without nicotine. Considering that I smoked three packs a day for 27 years, it's a miracle that I haven't keeled over dead from lung cancer. I spent 17 of those 27 years trying to quit. I did everything from cold turkey to the nicoderm patch, and nothing worked. Somebody once told me that nicotine is more addictive than heroin. I believe that person. I lived in a constant state of anxiety over my nicotine addiction. I knew that I would kill myself if I kept smoking. At the same time, I lived in a constant state of despair over my nicotine addiction, and every failure made it worse.
I think that the most difficult part of quitting cigarettes is the non-smokers who do not understand how difficult it is to quit. Life insurance agents can be the most determined pests when it comes to quitting smoking. At the same time they can be the most callous. ?Just use the patch,? my bosses kept telling me. The fact that I am allergic to the patch was irrelevant. They kept telling me that quitting was a matter of will power. They were both right and wrong at the same time.
They were right when it came to being a matter of will power. Never having smoked themselves, they never suffered nicotine withdrawal. Like any other drug, withdrawal is different for everybody. Ray Charles managed to kick heroin by going cold turkey for three days, and then he was fine. William Burroughs and Jerry Garcia never managed it. The withdrawal was just too hard on both of them. They would be able to cut down their usage for a while, but eventually the need would creep up on them. The same could be said for me. I would fight myself down to a pack a day or under, and then next thing I knew, I was smoking four packs a day.
They were right when it came to being a matter of will power. Never having smoked themselves, they never suffered nicotine withdrawal. Like any other drug, withdrawal is different for everybody. Ray Charles managed to kick heroin by going cold turkey for three days, and then he was fine. William Burroughs and Jerry Garcia never managed it. The withdrawal was just too hard on both of them. They would be able to cut down their usage for a while, but eventually the need would creep up on them. The same could be said for me. I would fight myself down to a pack a day or under, and then next thing I knew, I was smoking four packs a day.
Eventually I managed to quit. First I switched over to organic tobacco in order to avoid all the fillers that make cigarettes even more addictive. Not only was I detoxing from nicotine, but from other devilish substances that the tobacco industry slips into their products. They stuff in things like valerian root extract in order to make it more difficult to quit. After several years of organic cigarettes it was just me and the demon nicotine. which I was then able to taper down to half a pack a day, and then I quit entirely during a kidney infection.
My bosses were wrong in that it was simply will power. Tobacco companies have done too good a job in making their products more deadly. There are now entire industries built around quitting cigarettes. There are classes, patches, filters, seminars, ministries, 12 step programs, and they all center around quitting cigarettes. Would all these industries be making a profit if they actually worked as promised? It is unlikely.
One of the things that keeps me from smoking is a documentary about the late Warren Zevon shown on VH1. The audience got to watch the poor sonuvagun die of tobacco-induced lung cancer. One of the most horrible things I ever saw on TV was watching poor Zevon with a cigarette in his mouth. He was so weak he was weaving on his feet. He was so thin that he didn't even have muscle tone, but he was still smoking. I saw that during my first month as a recovering smoker, and it was so horrible that I could not get the image out of my mind.
How many other people have died as miserably as Warren Zevon? How many other people have died while sucking on their murderer's products? According to the American Cancer Society's website, it is 440,000 people a year. Every year 440,000 people die from a product that is readily available in every gas station, convenience store, supermarket, and liquor store in the country. What does that say about our economy? What does that say about a financial industry that trades on a product that kills 440,000 people a year? With that sort of mentality, is there any wonder that people are losing their homes?
The yearly deaths from smoking ties into a callous financial system that deliberately manipulated people for its own gain through the mortgage industry. There is a huge difference between letting people die of their own accord, and supporting the industry that kills them. When the US supports an industry that succeeds by killing its customers, then the entire financial meltdown really makes sense. The question is, when are we, the people, going to put our feet down and stop it?
http://www.thetruth.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=truth+anti+smoking+web+site&utm_content=truth_website&utm_campaign=thetruth
http://www.chantix.com/content/Chantix_Branded_Homepage.jsp?setShowOn=../content/Chantix_Branded_Homepage.jsp&setShowHighlightOn=../content/Chantix_Branded_Homepage.jsp&source=google&HBX_PK=s_quit+smoking&HBX_OU=50&o=23119569|166373525|0
http://www.anti-smoking.org/?gclid=CNrAoMiklJYCFRg6awodsQaYFA
[caption id="attachment_329" align="aligncenter" width="255" caption="San Francisco's Worse Habit"]
[/caption]
Original source: http://billdunlap.wordpress.com/?p=327
