How long has burning things and inhaling them been around? At least since Egyptians, right? Did they have drugs back then?
If ancient man could see the way we took the ancient plant they smoked, processed it through a big vat with chemicals and extracted the thing that gives you a high, and then smoked the pure chemical thing that came out, they’d flip their lid.
What method do they use to extract the nicotine? What is that suspension liquid you are heating up? Inquiring minds want to know.
Yeah but the Egyptians pulled people’s brains out through their noses with long hooks before interring their corpses, so I don’t need their pearl clutching about our nasty-ass cigarettes.
I am pretty sure modern medicine is about putting hooks through noses to reach brains while people aren’t dead yet. I won’t judge!
It works both ways. No need to forecast a tragedy that hasn’t happened, and isn’t either likely nor unlikely to happen.
I am clueless about this. Not sure I want to know.
A couple of years ago I quit smoking after a solid 30 years. I still don’t feel like an ex-smoker, and I’m not sure I ever will; I just haven’t happened to have smoked in the last 20 months or so. It took two family members getting stage 4 cancer diagnoses (different types) to rock my foundation about it.
I tried vaping for a few weeks, and that worked great. One major problem though: I still felt like an addict. Still going outside in the rain. Still planning my day around it. I realized I didn’t just want to stop inhaling smoke into my lungs, I wanted to remove it’s power over my behavior and vaping felt like a cop-out.
I do miss the solidarity of smokers at various venues however. You’d always run into the same people you wouldn’t otherwise meet.
I started off vaping only in the same places I’d normally smoke as a straight up replacement.
After like a month I stopped feeling that urge. I stopped taking it with me just because I was running a few errands or whatever. I no longer felt compelled to vape in the car like I used to smoke in the car.
I feel like that was a small, but weirdly significant moment for me personally. That’s when I realized that I could just change whatever I wanted and no longer felt like I was just playing the same tune on repeat.
Hah. Reading this now, that is a perfect quote of my 50+ self. “Negative Nancy,” I feel like, sometimes. It’s true, but the older I get the more I dwell on, “everything is going to kill me.”
I just wanted to bump this thread. 9 years ago, about this time, I decided to quit on July 4th and make it my Independence day. Up until this point, I was somewhat of an expert on quitting. I had quit 15 or 20 times before. I think this time it worked because I planned it out for so long - and I used the long July 4th holiday to basically go apeshit (my wife & family travelled to her parents house so I was alone) for the 3 days of physical addiction.
The mental addiction takes years. Hell I still get phantom cigarette smoke occasionally, although it’s less & less as time goes by.
If you are smoking - just know that you can quit.
I believe I’m entering year 11 smoke free. I still think about it a little wistfully every month or so, but the interest in being chained to those things is basically gone.
Every once in a while I think I want to take up smoking a pipe or something, and then I realize I’m a degenerate smoker and it wouldn’t take long and I’d be doing six or seven pipes a day and so I stay away.
I got hooked in college smoking cloves and then graduated to chewing because I coudn’t afford to leave my desk so many times a day.
A few weeks back, on my wifes desk was a pack of Clove cigarettes. Holy smokes I wanted to pull one out and give it a whirl, but I knew if I just had one puff I’d be back on them in no time.
I asked her “WTF” are these doing in here after I clawed my way back from the edge and she said my son left them but “they aren’t his, they were his girlfriends”.
Ugh. I can not have that temptation lying around!
I quit something like 7 years ago. Literally the only time I think about it is a very occasional dream in which I smoke and then at some point realise I’m supposed to have quit and feel guilty about it. When I’m awake, never.
9 years here as well, quit in 2010. I just chewed a lot of normal (non-nicotine) gum, and ended up making a giant sphere out of the leftover gum as large as a volleyball. It was pretty gross.
About a year and a half for me.
I feel like I can finally say without a doubt that I have zero urges anymore. I can be in the vicinity of a smoker and while it smells gross it doesn’t bother me or tempt me whatsoever.
I don’t feel like I can necessarily take any kind of credit for that, but it’s incredibly relieving and I’m very thankful I’m at this point.
Congratulations to all of you who quit. Give yourselves a pat on the back!
I am lucky like you: after cutting the nicotine, there were a few months of various chewing (mostly matches, convincing myself I could be Chow Yeunfat or something), but since that rocky period, nothing, not the slightest envy.
Oh, god, for the first few months I was going through Haribo like nobody’s business.
I chewed so much gum that my jaw ached like a truckstop hooker.
I’m just over a year and a half. I only think about it occasionally, but I really enjoy when people smoke around me now – I like wistfully smelling it. Had to stay away for about a year, though.
This quit that worked was a lot more intentional. I used the Freedom From Smoking plan, which my wo;rk paid for, and I made plans several months in advance. I always had problems around the 30 day mark, so I situated my quit date such that my 30 day mark fell at a time I would have an easier time not smoking.
I quit in 2000. I used Wellbutrin, which was very effective. I had tried to quit cold turkey and failed within a few hours. It was depressing. My doctor suggested the medication. I started it with a “quit date” a few weeks into the future, and I didn’t really expect that it would work, but it ended up being trivial to quit. I was so surprised. The date arrived and I just stopped smoking like it was nothing. No cravings, none of that. Amazing. Every once in a while I would get a mild urge, but it wasn’t the sort of craving that seizes up your mind and makes it impossible to think about anything else. In fact, 19 years later, I still get the occasional craving from out of the blue, and they still are the easy kind that I can overcome without too much effort.
34 years. Thought it was the hardest vice to give up for a long time, then discovered it was one of the easiest. But it was the first. You always remember your first …