Quitting: The Smokers View

Josh Rogers
As a smoker, there is a constant assault of people attempting to tell you how bad what you are doing is for you, or telling you that you can't smoke in a place because it's bad for their health. I can understand people not wanting smoking indoors. Even I feel that smoking indoors is inconsiderate to the people within the building. What I can't understand is people's penchant to feel that they have the right to try and keep me from smoking if I choose.

Thirty years ago, or maybe even more, it is completely understandable that people wouldn't have understood that the decision they were making to smoke was negatively affecting their health. Today, it is completely unfathomable that a smoker does not understand the health risks associated with smoking. I know that I do. I've been told time and again by various people how bad it is for my health, and that I needed to quit. That never stopped me. Even knowing that it was causing me who knows how many potential future health risks I didn't care. I liked smoking, it was my crutch. It was my way of dealing with stress, my excuse to go outside, my way of socializing. It was what I did when I went to bars underage and couldn't drink. It was what I did when I partied. The list of things that gave me reason to smoke goes on and on. I loved smoking cloves in the beginning, it was a flavor thing. I loved how they tasted. Djarum Blacks were my vice.
After the federal government, in their infinite wisdom, decided to outlaw the sale of kretek and clove cigarettes on U.S. soil, on a bill backed by none other than Phillip Morris, owner of Marlboro, I figured that I could quit fairly easily, being as I could no longer smoke what I wanted to. How wrong I was. I see now, that I have actually gotten to that point, that I couldn't quit then because I didn't want to. Then, it was a vanity project. "Oh, I'm quitting," I would tell all of the people that tried to convert me to a non-smoker. The sad fact is though that I didn't want to quit, I was being forced to give up my craving (cloves) by a nameless, faceless entity that had no right taking that away from me. Smoking was my pursuit of happiness, isn't that covered in the Constitution, at least in the Declaration, but alas, I am but one poor man who can't really throw down an oppressive regime.
Instead, I started smoking alternatives. Cigarettes, cigars, hookah, pipe, whatever had nicotine and the wonderful burn in my lungs. I still get that physical craving from time to time, my lungs telling me that they want to be filled with smoke. It's not even so much the nicotine anymore, after two weeks without, just the wish to go through the act of smoking. After a year, I finally decided that I was sick of not being able to readily smoke cloves, and more than sick of spending just as much on crappier tasting cigarettes, then it hit me, I actually wanted to quit. So I took up the banner of quitting yet again, about my fifth time, maybe even more since I started college. This time, unlike all those previous, I was actually able to stay off of tobacco.
Why? Most certainly not because the school had banned smoking on campus, that just led me to resent the school. Nor because the school, the anti-tobacco people on campus, and my non-smoker friends were telling me how bad it was for me. I couldn't even bring myself to quit because my fiancée wanted me to. I finally wanted to quit for me, and that was why I was able to take up the banner and make it as far as I have. So, consider that the next time you decide to inform the lowly smoker outside that they are going to get cancer by doing what they are doing. They know, the idea that they don't know is absurd, and they don't care. If they did, they wouldn't be smoking.