I've never really understood the craving and addiction: < for years after quitting I'd flip down the sun visor in my car at a stoplight.. expecting to catch the falling pack of smokes and light up.. and then realise.. Oh yeah I quit LOL.. but yes the physical rip your chest out craving was pretty well gone in about 3 months.. >
I've tried smoking several times and can get into the swing of it but end up feeling poisoned [can take 4 a day but 2 is more tolerable] and thinking "Hey, wait a minute, who's in charge around here?" and giving it away as unrewarding and annoying in many ways. Same with booze, coffee, tea. I can experience the merits, but the demerits outweigh the good part and even the good part seems like a fake good part [like pornography and prostitutes instead of marriage]. I'm currently on a coffee-habit but I'm increasingly feeling polluted and water tastes nicer [especially in summer when the heat and sweet lose some allure]. 1 x coffee a day is about the max and 1 every 2 or 3 days is better to get the "fix" effect. About 10 years ago I tried being an alcoholic and it was great to sit on the deck of the golf club as the sun set in the west after a hard day of trying to reach par feeling the suffusing intoxication, scoffing a whole half bottle of wine then another when getting home. But the jadedness afterwards is too debilitating.
Once into the smoking syndrome, and thinking "Yay, a cigarette for breakfast", it seems like that self-consuming monster of greed is looming [kirtimukha].
Giving up is easy. Just flip the mental switch and ditch them. The problem seems to be when the mental switch hasn't actually happened and part of the brain is negotiating with the other intellectual part and it's actually an argument rather than a decision which has been made. "Can you guys please stop telling me to go and get some smokes?" Of course the kirtimukha/greed/pleasure-seeking trouble makers win every time if there's discussion. You really have to lay the law down to them and explain who is in charge. Seriously in charge = like the Beijing bosses, not like some vapid democratic politician being blown in the wind with clouds of smoke.
Booze, coffee, tea are amenable to dabbling, but dabbling in cigarettes is no good because to enjoy them, you first have to get past the outright poisoning and into the addiction "fix" aspect of it, which takes about a week. It's probably best to just ditch the whole lot as not worth the hassle. But people love their games to play. [I don't know about all the other games - heroin, dope, cocaine, amphetamines, ketamines, lysergic acid diethanolamide, fungal hallucinogens, kava, cactus neurotoxins, various other poisons = but I suppose the same principles apply to those too.
Make the whole lot legal which would at least stop the allure of doing something defiant, and force people into confronting their own MADness. Tell them, "Hey you are on your own - nothing to do with us. Poison yourself any way you like." Just like it used to be when heroin was a significant import into Australia and I suppose other countries. Having Helen Clark harassing is a good reason to smoke in defiance. The dumb authoritarians can't understand that the more they force people to obey, the more some people want to smoke.
Mqurice |
