"Two packs a day? Wow. That's killer," the doctor said. And the doctor before him said that as did the one before him. I didn't care. Not once in my 23 years as a smoker did I give one thought to the subject of quitting.
The doctors liked to point out that two packs a day meant you were psych, too. All the more reason to keep smoking, I thought. A happy and content psych isn't a psych. Why mess with success?
I was never a casual smoker. I did not work my way up to two packs. It was two packs from the get go. And I never smoked lights. Give me the full strength cowboy killers. Give me the full strength cancer. For bonus points, for the first five or so years I switched brands every pack. That practice gave me an instant hack.
I have been a dedicated smoker, willing to be shoved around endlessly because of my habit. I have been relegated to smoke rooms, smoking areas, to places out of doors to confined little plastic shacks well away from buildings. I have been content to stink: my clothes stink, my car stinks, my home stinks. I have restricted my dating only to women who are also tar addicts. All of this I have done without hesitation, blink or flinch. I am that dedicated.
I have hacked up wads (of lung, I think.) My very movements are presaged by a wheeze and a rattle. I can no longer bolt stairs nor run. I have long forgotten what the air smells like in Spring or what food tastes like. My sleep happens between fits of choking on snot. None of this ever bothered me.
I have endured massive cost increases.
Wait. No I have not. If there is one part of this that has bugged me it is the price. The price hurts. It is not so much that I am poor--I smoked in both times of relative feast and famine--but rather that cigarettes have always been a rip-off for what you get. It is key to my tale that this is the one thing that has always bothered me.
For the entire 23 years of my addiction, cigarettes have never been cheap. They have always been line item three in my very terse budget: just above gasoline, just below food. Thanks to constant increases--universally in the form of taxation--they should have long overtaken food. But I had a way out.
For a while I bought off brand cigarettes. But due to taxes, the actual cost between real cigarettes and Old Gold or Lucky Strike narrowed to the point of not being worth the bother. Then I started shopping outside of the county. Eventually, I moved (although saving on cigs was not the primary reason.) Cigarettes in the county I now reside in are half that of adjacent Cook county. Currently that's a difference between $4 a pack and $8 a pack. Even $4 a pack is about $1,25 above my pain threshold. A few price increases before this I had dropped out of the world of retail cigarettes altogether.
I will call the firm Squanto's Smokes. It was a creature of the internet, like many bad things. Squanto was physically located on an Indian reservation improbably in New York State. If you were willing to trust Squanto with some rather sensitive information and in turn sent Squanto and affidavit essentially saying that you were not in the cigarette retailing business, he would mail order vend you smokes at a minimum of 1/3rd off the prevailing cost. The price drop was even more profound if you were willing to switch to one of Squanto's fine house brands, such as the Malboro knock off Native. I was getting my smokes at $1.60 a pack for a period of two years.
Having evaded the price hikes inflicted on my fellow puffers somewhat blunted the other indignities that were now involved with smoking. Sort of. At about the same time, laws were passed that essentially forbade smoking in any area that WAS NOT your car or your home. You couldn't even smoke in bars anymore. Even places which were arguably outside, such as forest preserves and baseball stadiums, went along with the ban. And there was no sign of a push back.
Sadly, I am somebody. My career involves not dropping out of society. Other people can sit in their houses and smoke to their heart's content. Changing jobs and working at home is just not an option. My living, unfortunately, involves leaving the house, looking presentable and being somewhere else for a period of time. As time went on the mandatory smoke free intervals increased exponentially. For this reason, I began to seek a smoking substitute. Just something to get me through to the next non non smoking interval.
Chaw was out. Chaw is disgusting. People with dip cups should not be seen and should be castrated and boiled alive in oil while still wearing their stupid baseball caps.
The patch was out, simply because it required a total cessation of smoking. It is not a buffer med. It has no off switch. Quitting smoking, at that point, was not my objective. The gum may have worked, but it was too expensive to just dabble in. They don't sell it in trail packs. I didn't feel like being $99.00 into something before I knew if it worked.
It was at this point that I chanced upon the electric cigarette.
It was a mistake.
I know that electronic cigarettes are highly advertised on the internet and radio right now. The reason that they have to be so heavily advertised is that they effectively have no repeat business. (This is information I received from the manufacturer of the product shown. He, like most of the original peddlers, has since gone out of business.) I actually blundered onto these before the current boom. Allow me to save you $100.00 by explaining why they don't work.
1. It is not at all smoking. It's sucking on a plastic pacifier full of drizzle. There is no taste. There is no smoking sensation, only a visual illusion. Moreover, the visual illusion does not work on you. You damn well know that isn't cigarette smoke.
2. You know it isn't smoke because you aren't getting any nicotine buzz. The electric cigarette is fine if you are an actor playing someone who is smoking, but pretty much useless for a drug addict. The delivery system is piss poor and has a massive and erratic delay. Due to the erratic nature of the system you stand a chance of accidentally overdosing on nicotine. (Rarely fatal, but bothersome since it can impair motor functions and cause drowsiness.) More likely, you are going to quit sucking on the stupid thing because it isn't doing anything. This is because...
3. The nicotine cigarette tips are about as shoddy of a product as they can be. Even with identical models of the same strength, the duration of the nicotine charge varies widely. It may last one use, two uses, ten uses or not at all. Most Electronic Cigarettes are now being marketed without the nicotine modules. They were and are that poor. Unless you are primarily addicted to the visual sensation of smoking--as opposed to nicotine--the electronic cigarette is downright useless. That's when it works at all.
4. The elctronic cigarette is never ready. The quality problems don't just affect the add on features. The base machine itself is pretty shoddy. Although it charges up quickly, it does not hold a charge very long. The net effect is that your electronic cigarette is always in need of charging. It doesn't really last very long when used, either.
Having cycled through the fraud that is the electronic cigarette, I slipped into the practice of simply going cold turkey between smoking opportunities. It was unpleasant, but after a while it was a normal unpleasant. Weirdly, I didn't cut down smoking at all. I was now power smoking, I guess. All I know is that my consumption remained the same. I was not yet ready to take the next step.
A federal tax of ten dollars a carton descended on cigarette land, which even Squanto had to pass on. This added two dollars a pack to the price of even my cigarettes. That was pushing things a bit. Then the hammer came.
A federal law banned the sale of cigarettes via the mail. Squanto the New York Indian and his entire reservation were put out of business. Fedex and UPS, which are somewhat dependent on the USPO, also went along with the ban. My days of wholesale smokes seemed over.
Retail smokes were now ranging from $4.80 to $10.00 a pack. At two packs a day, this is a budget buster--canceling lunch and occluding dinner. Surely there had to be a way around it? I had found one before, I would find one again.
Rolling my own did come to mind. This despite the manual ineptitude that has kept me out of the arts and made every furniture assembly chore a date with disaster. It was while investigating this option that I hit upon the final frontier as far as cost dodging was concerned.
Before attempting to train my fingers into a new skill set and going cowboy, I made one last survey of the retail premade cigarette environment. It was (and is) possible to buy cigarettes via mail order overseas. Let me warn you against this. This is a field laden with scam artists. You really do not want to trust any of your credit info to someone who needs to use dubious off shore servers. Even when it works, the cigarettes are not what you expected (popular brands can taste different when made or marketed overseas) and are often stale. It is also a crime. Overall, my information indicates that very few people have been satisfied with this method. There was also the idea of driving to an Indian reservation and buying smokes there.
As it turns out, that is an option for about 1/10th of 1 percent of the population. People who live by the Navajo Nation already know about it. For the rest of us, there really is no place to drive.
There certainly wasn't for me. News Flash: There are no Indian reservations within driving distance of Chicago. Despite the fact that the state is named for an Indian tribe, there are no Indians in Illinois. (The Illini were wiped out.) Despite the name, there are no Indian reservations in Indiana. (Which is sort of a sore spot with the Indians, to be honest.) What tribes there are in Wisconsin are more prone to harpooning fish and casino gambling than they are the sale of cigarettes. Worse, the Socialist State of Badgerland has so laden cigarettes with State taxes that it is cheaper to buy them in downtown Chicago than it is off their reservations.
Just as all seemed dark, all seemed gloom, as I was chancing practice with a jar of Tops and a pack of Zig Zags, I discovered a "service" which would roll my cigarettes for me. It was the best dodge ever! And it was local, too. They just started popping up with the last tax increase. Dozens of stores in Chicago were now equipped with machines that would roll the cigarettes for you. All you had to do was buy the loose tobacco and papers from them. They then stuffed the stuff into a machine which blow-crammed created filtered cigarettes. Yeah, you had to wait while it did this. It took a good ten minutes, if nothing went wrong. At the end of the process you had 200 loose cigarettes--a full carton--at the out the door price of $12.00. That's way better than the Indians. *
One problem: the cigarettes themselves. I'm not saying that our shop operators were trying to pull something or were perhaps ignorant of tobacco, but what was this stuff? Dried cat vomit and paint shavings come to mind. Despite the rancid flavor, they were at best milds. They were also rather tough on the draw--as in, about a third of them were impermeable. Whatever. Details! It was a proof of concept and the concept was excellent.
Unlike real cigarette, a lot depended on the selection of the operator. Also unlike real cigarettes, the operator was largely me. I was content that I would be able to figure out the right blend on my own. Or so I told myself with every wretched puff from the first batch.
The shop that I was doing my automated rolling at was fairly close to work. The day after the last of my first batch had dwindled, I took my lunch hour to drop in and make another carton. By this time I had carefully gone over my mistakes and knew (in the manner that people living in denial know things) what steps I needed to rectify them.
The shop itself was dark and dank, apparently a former nail salon, complete with black film shades over the front window. Inside the narrow space was a glass counter filled with bongs and hookahs and rolling papers. On the other wall were bookcases crammed with retail cartons of off brand cigarettes and Marlboro reds. It stunk of incense. At the front of the store was the black, industrial dryer sized machine that spat out cigarettes one at a time into a plastic shoe box on the floor.
The routine here was that you picked your cigarettes up from the floor once the machine was safely through spitting. You then went to a table and hand packed the cigarettes into the carton the rolling papers had come in.
On this second occasion, there was a diminutive blond woman ahead of me. She was boxing up two cartons of smokes and had a third still in the spitting process. From her quite loud cell phone conversation, I had gleaned that she was making one box for herself, one box for her mother (who lived in the same mobile home park as she does) and one box for the father of one of her children, who was in prison. I noticed that there seemed to be a line of green fish scales running up her neck and crossing over her jaw line.
When she turned to excuse herself for taking so long, I spotted the large tattoo of a dragon she had on her face. The dragon's head completely encircled her left eye, which was missing an eyebrow.
That was it. I quit. First time it ever came to mind. Not to be dismissive of this poor woman, but I had no intention of being any part of her demographic.
As an adult, I am fairly familiar with the feeling one has when one has strayed well past the bounds of the Law of Diminishing Returns and are staring Pyrrhic victory straight in the face. I was done. I had been done a long time ago. And it was time for me to face up to it.
I left the store. I would like to say I went cold turkey at this point. Sadly, I would be (a) lying and probably (b) writing you from prison.
I later bought a carton of Marlboro reds at the full retail price. And I bought the gum.
You really probably should just quit smoking before you start on the gum. I didn't. Instead, what I did was substitute the gum for various smoking situations. It was the gum for the drive in to work. It was the gum at work and it was the gum on the way home from work. The only time I actually smoked was when I woke up and after I got home. Eventually I cut out smoking after work. Three weeks into it and I still had packages of cigarettes remaining from the original carton. Fairly soon, I wasn't smoking at all.
Or you can do it their way.
Anyone who can obey--or even figure out the instructions--is a better person than I. The warning states that you should not chew more than one piece every two hours. The instructions say that you should chew at least 9 pieces as day. There are also some instructions on how to chew the gum.
In the end, however, if you chew it any way you want when you need to, that's good, too. That took me two weeks to figure out--all because I was stupid enough to read the instructions and the warnings.
A few words about the gum. It does make you burp, at least when you start a new piece. As a man, this doesn't bother me at all. If you want to avoid this problem, try the special chewing instructions. As opposed to effectively not chewing something that is in your mouth for up to two minutes, I suggest you just get used to the burping. It passes. The gum will also make your gums bleed, unless you are already the type of person who chews gum all day long. You will get sick of the gum--unless, again, you are the type of person who chews gum all day long. If you want a break from the gum--and you will if you are normal--try substituting the nicotine lozenges.
Warning: the nicotine lozenges are not candy. At all. They taste like pharmaceutical cherry and are the size of pregnant nickles. As they are an aspirin like consistency, you can not bite into them. Or you shouldn't. This is just sucking on something to get the monkey off. There is nothing enjoyable about it.
You can potentially overdose on both the gum and the lozenges. When it comes to the gum, your best bet is to pop in a new piece when your current gum no longer has any taste OR is now the consistency of a rubber band AND you really need a cigarette. When it comes to the lozenges, stick to the two hour interval.
I have now tried every flavor of the nicotine gum and can faithfully report that they are all essentially mint. The people who originated this product are a bit more careful than the people who produce knock offs. Given that the knock offs are just as effective and about half the cost, you have to go with the knock offs. But I do have to warn you that all of the knock off favors are mint flavor--even the no flavor--no matter what it says on the box. Just learn to like mint. It's not for long.
I am now three months in and am now at the stage where I am going to quit the gum altogether. Which is to say that I am going to switch to the patch. I do not really trust myself to monitor my own wean down and the patch has the best measured approach.
Although these products are somewhat expensive, they are about half of what I was spending on cigarettes and a fraction of what I would have spent on cigarettes at the full retail price. That for me is comfort enough.
Since quitting, my senses have recovered somewhat. I have regained my singing voice, much to the absolute horror of the people I live with. I no longer wheeze nor rattle. Food tastes better, but a cigarette would taste better still.
What you have heard about quitting smoking and weight gain is largely fiction. I have largely gained 23 entirely fictional pounds.
***
* The place wasn't for long, either. Knowing the suburb I was in, I was shocked to see bongs out in the open. The cops in this town are not shy about clamping down on contraband. The first time the cop spots something a merchant shouldn't be selling, he'll tell the owner to get rid of it. If the bong is there on the second visit, the cop will break it.
My sister visited this shop sometime after me and said that the rolling machine had been shut down. One of the police had decided--on the spot--that the device was designed to evade the paying of taxes and told the merchant to shut it off. Not being stupid, the merchant complied.
While my sister was getting this story from the shopkeeper, my niece rather suddenly bolted from the store. It seems one of the shop's helpers had grabbed her by the rear end.
(Not Posted By Mark Lax nor anyone he knows)
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