Tomorrow night will represent 22 years since I last smoked a cigarette. 31st December 1993, at around 10 minutes before midnight and it was a Marlboro. Not your watered-down Marlboro Light fag – they’re for girls – but a full-blown, lung-busting Marlboro. Laugh? I almost choked.
Giving up smoking was easy, I know because this was at least the fifth time I had tried, but this time it was essential. I knew from my family history, particularly on my mother’s side with two lung cancer deaths and two heart disease deaths (all smokers, of course) that there were strong odds that I too was in the frame for an earlier than scheduled demise. This time, the last time, I had a plan. I had decided many months before that 31st December 1993 would see me smoke my last fag. For once, I saw it through.
The first few days were horrendous. When you are gasping for a smoke it is for no other reason than needing a nicotine hit. Smoking was not alleviating any stresses and anxieties from real life. It was the drug. That’s what keeps you smoking. A few weeks and I barely felt any better, although the distraction of the imminent arrival of our first child strengthened my resolve. By the spring, I knew I had cracked it. Not only that, I had learned to loathe cigarettes. I started to detest the smell and I hated the way people who did smoke stank of tobacco. Their clothes, their breath, their hair. And a few months ago, that was me.
I managed to quit prior to the invention of vaping and all the available evidence suggests vaping is 95% less dangerous than smoking. That’s primarily because all those pesky carcinogens – around 300 of them – are in the tobacco and there’s no tobacco when you vape.
But I am glad that there was no vaping when I stopped smoking. I had to go through the stresses of going without nicotine from the start and whilst it was ghastly for a while, I am glad I didn’t have the option of the halfway house. That’s because with many people the halfway house goes on forever and with that lies the temptation to just have that one cheeky fag, the real thing, which will, I imagine, be far more pleasurable than the pretend fag. I can imagine that’s how I would have turned out! I’ll just have the one!
E-cigs are a welcome alternative to tobacco. Less people will commit long term and often agonising suicide at huge financial cost and more people will be healthier.
There’s still a need to keep the vaping in the smoking area, for symbolism if nothing else, but the E Cig is one of the great inventions of my lifetime.
When you have seen loved ones die as a direct result of smoking, you would not wish it on anyone else. And anyone who is using the New Year to give up the facts and start vaping, then good luck to you.
