Ladies and Gentlemen, please allow me to present my addiction...This is what I crave, desire, think I need and what, if I am not careful, will eventually kill me.
A 4" stick of dried tobacco leaves wrapped in a light paper, housing a filter that prevents leaf debris flying down ones throat on the inhale.
I started shortly after embarking on the educational interlude in my life known as public school. At the time I was about thirteen years old and by and large rather impressionable.
In a bid to fit-in with the "cool" crowd, I tried that first "fag" standing behind a cricket store, next to a copse on the school grounds. There must of been five or six of us. The cigarette was offered, I accepted, having purported to trying it before and then gagged, coughed and spluttered like the novice I truly was, to a chorus of kids laughing at my "uncoolness".
Funny really, considering that a few years prior, at the inception of my educational journey, my father had sat with me in the family car at the gates of my prep school and told me that I was not to be tempted to mix with the wrong crowd and start smoking and drinking.
It would appear that his warning was well founded despite being ineffective. I wonder now though, that if he had not said anything would I have still tried to impress the cool kids? I can not say if he had the same conversation with my brother but to this day, he has never touched a single cigarette - Interesting thoughts?
As time passed I began smoking more and more, through college, university and then I joined the hotel trade were I graduated to heavy smoker, I justified this excess in part due to the work that I was doing: Long, hard hours that required a vice to take time-out and while drinking in the workplace is essentially frowned upon smoking is not.
I have now been smoking for almost twenty years. I probably smoke in the region of 15 to 20 "fags" a day and whilst I have altered my career path slightly, I now justify my need to smoke with the fact that I don't have a window in my office and by the fact that I am, on the whole, desk-bound and need to step away from the monotony of an office job.
As a younger smoker, "back in the day", there were public service announcements on TV that eluded to the harms of smoking, shortness of breath taking stairs, coughs, susceptibility to ill health, general stench and unattractiveness to the opposite sex.
On the whole, very good reasons to stop, but to the young, immortal mind of the growing adult, you never really feel that you will succumb to the drug so badly, and even before then you will have the will to stop.
As it happens, I do get short of breath taking flights of stairs, I do have a permanent cough and sniffling nose and while I don't get sick too often, the look of someone with a cigarette really is unattractive and the smell on people after they smoke is something to gag at.
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Fooled by images such as our good friend, Joe Camel here, many of us have tried to enhance our image thinking that smoking is cool.
Is it cool? I think not. Why do I still do it? I guess I enjoy the hit, the time-outs and from time to time, the connection you have with other fellow smokers.
As it happens, while I surfed the information super highway for images to enhance my incessant ramblings on this blog, I chanced upon a British Council web page that states that nicotine is more addictive than Heroin. That cigarettes, or rather the tar that they produce contain Arsenic, formaldehyde and cyanide and that 70% of the tar produced by cigarettes stay in our lungs. I also learnt that cigarettes produce Carbon Monoxide, [a poisonous gas produced by the incomplete burning of solid, liquid, and gaseous fuels. A gas a car exhaust emits as well as a gas produced by burning charcoal or wood amongst others] and that red blood cells absorb Carbon Monoxide more easily than oxygen and with that, in some cases a smokers blood can contain 15% Carbon Monoxide.
It's no wonder smoking Joe looks like this these days:
If nothing else, just the thought that arsenic and Cyanide are contained in the tar that now lies idly within my lungs is enough for me to put the cigarette out.
What plays with me most is the fact that nicotine is so addictive. It takes seven seconds for the drug to hit the brain, that's faster than heroin!
But at least three weeks for it to completely leave your system, the struggle ahead is going to be immense! I have tried to give up two or three times, obviously to no avail, and when I fold I always seem to come back harder.
Will this time around be different? I'm unsure? Although this time, I think I'm going to go it alone. No patch, no gum, no plastic placebo type contraption.
I think that the simple thought that each time I take a puff, it's like playing Russian roulette with my health. The weapon of choice being a lethal cocktail of arsenic, Cyanide and formaldehyde, shaken not stirred, on the rocks, only this time the rocks are represented by smoking charcoal - not likely to win really are you?
As I bring this particular posting to a close, I felt that I should place a couple of additional images to urge my cessation of this bad habit.
On my left a reasonable representation of every smoker each time they put a fag in their mouth, and on the right, an ash try... How attractive!
Lastly and more painfully, a smokers lungs.
Pretty aren't they?
One final thing. It occurred to me that whilst Alcoholics have their own support group for a drug that also has similar addictive qualities, it would seem to me that smokers should have one... So I googled Smokers Anonymous.
It would appear we have a 12-Step program. If it helps, check out; www.nicotine-anonymous.org
Ladies and Gentlemen, it has, as always been a pleasure.
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