My Nicotine Addiction.

I quit smoking about a year and a half ago but still have an addiction to nicotine. After pulling up some quick facts at http://www.adha.org, it is clear that tobacco and nicotine are very addictive, deadly.... and popular. We all know how bad nicotine is in all its forms. Lung cancer, throat cancer, heart disease, asthma and the list goes on. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA) says nearly 46 million Americans are hooked! How is it that I managed to play into smoking? I had taken up smoking in the summer of 2006. Random smoking led to occasional smoking which led to moderate smoking... you get it.

   About four months later I was at two and a half packs a day. At this point smoking was just maintenance. The only buzz I got was in the morning and sometimes if I had a few drinks in the evening and tried to keep a couple hours between lights. The rest was just habit and it was disgusting. It was a problem at home; my family isolated me to the backyard. I had people coming at me from all directions asking me and telling me to quit. I work in a retail/warehouse atmosphere and the sales people kept bugging me about the smoke always traveling into the store from the back alley where we had huge doors open during our hours of operation. A realization later came to me that with smoking, like any addiction requires the addict to have to want to quit themselves to achieve success. I later became tired, unhealthy, and broke from my tobacco use. A pill is what I thought would solve my problems, and this pill did solve them for a couple months. I had my doctor prescribe a fairly new medication called Chantix. This stuff is amazing. It took away the cravings in two days tops. I later stopped taking Chantix because the cravings were gone, I was cured! Money was also an issue; it cost around $120 for a month’s supply. I was nicotine free for a month and a half. Later an idea came to me: smoking tobacco is bad for your health because of all the carcinogens you inhale; but nicotine, only heart disease, I can live with that. Nicotine lozenges when chewed might still give me a buzz, After beginning to chew nicotine lozenges I achieved that buzz I was missing out on. I am now chewing two 4mg nicotine lozenges every hour or two. Doing these costs more than buying cigarettes, messes up my stomach, and looks disgusting. When you chew these things it gets stuck in your teeth and looks like you have the most horrid plaque buildup. The taste, I won’t even go there. Anyway I am now struggling to quit these lozenges and have been unsuccessful thus far but have also realized that for me personally, this is not near some of the other struggles I have had to deal with and for right now I will remain hooked and pray that someday this craving might leave me. Maybe a pill might help…nah

Until next time! --- Andrew

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