Quitting cigarettes: The cheap and easy way

First, let me make the point that nicotine is horribly addictive, for those of you who may still be in doubt about that. I once knew a guy by the name of Kato, who quit heroin a while before I met him. He did this on his own, going cold turkey with no outside motivation, not even his family nagging him along. Although I'm sure his story is not unique, I haven't heard of anyone else accomplishing the same. He told me that once he realized the immediate, destructive impact the drug was making on his life, he found the motivation necessary to get rid of it. Now the interesting thing is, Kato was never able to quit smoking, even though he tried. His personal take was that the addictive properties of Nicotine and Heroin were very similar, but the knowlege that smoking was taking ten years off the end of his life wasn't nearly enough to spur him on.

So we've got a guy saying that cigarette addiction can be as strong as Heroin addiction, and he's got the experience to back it up. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to quit cigarettes. I would know, as I have done so a number of times (please quit laughing). It usually lasts for about six months, until I'm completely rid of the physical addiction and start feeling like I'm back in control of my pet beast. At that point the temptation to play with it just a little overcomes me, and I go back to being a sometimes smoker for a few weeks. After that I'm back to twenty a day, every time.

This pattern of behaviour has puzzled me for a long time. Why would I exhibit signs of psychological addiction to such a shitty drug? Let's take a look at it: Cigarettes capture you in a horrible physical addiction, and immediately start impacting your health to the point where you notice if you're being honest with yourself. Over time the effects get steadily worse, up until the point where it kills you. Meanwhile you've got to deal with a reduced sense of smell and a considerable social stigma. And what do you get for all this? The most pathetic little trip in the whole drug book. It is insignificant the first few times you use it, then it loses its effects entirely.

Thinking about this, I had a eureka moment. What if the thing we like about Nicotine is the addiction itself? Look at it this way: Twenty times a day, you get to desperately crave something and then give it to yourself by simply taking it out of the pack and lighting it. It's almost like being desperately hungry and then treating yourself to a big meal - there are few things quite like it. Can you name any other context in which it is so easy to gratify such a desperate need with such frequency? I can't. In that context, the immediately visible cost of four kroner a pop doesn't seem so awful.

There are many ways to quit smoking, and I've tried a few of them. There's the cheap and hard way - going cold turkey on your own. Then there's the harder way, to go cold turkey for your friends and family. You've got the various schemes for stepping down your usage over time, which soften the blow somewhat, but which require even more willpower. There's the easy and expensive way, namely prescription drugs such as Zyban. Now I'm about to try the cheap and easy way: Having no money. I'm down to my last three Lucky Strikes, and I just turned down Lisette who stubbornly keeps offering to buy me more. I've thought long and hard about it, and the truth is that there are other eighty kroner a day habits which will give me much more pleasure. Increased inside temperatures, larger dinner rations, or perhaps even the spare diesel to go places. Such luxuries are hard to imagine now, but through a little abstinence, they are there for my taking.

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Other side of the night: Wow, that was sooo easy to say yesterday, when I still had three cigarettes. Now I have none, and I CRAVE! It's times like these when being isolated from humanity is a good thing.