They'll be first against the wall....

I heard an advert on local radio this morning. Turns out this chap was 4 days into his stop-smoking endeavor and was satisfying his hand to mouth habit by sucking casually on a biro. It turns out that the biro was leaking and he had spent the last 10 minutes chatting up some delightful stranger whilst looking like a bizarre negative version of Coco the Clown.
So what do our pharmaceutical friends do..?

Did they tell him to use a pencil, maybe a straw.? Did they suggest he might try sucking a mint or a lollipop perhaps.?

No…

They suggested he bought an inhalator, a cigarette replacement containing nicotine, despite the fact that at 4 days quit his body was entirely nicotine free thus restoring his addiction to nicotine and costing him money.

What a bunch of heartless bastards Nicorette are….

'tis true

332 now....

Countdown..

Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, as the precious seconds tick away counting down to I know not what… ok, I do actually. With two people it's cars, one a holiday, one cosmetic surgery, another the following weekend. Is it only me that looks forward to tomorrow…??

Still, it’s only 335 days to Christmas and I’m really excited…

In my back yard...???

Why on earth does a property developer propose a 4 storey apartment on my south-western boundary and wonder why I get a bit uppity.
There is always some tosser trying to make a fast buck at the expense of normal people. My horoscope said it would be a good month for getting even so I’m browsing EBay for Semtex this very moment but I can’t seem to find a suitable category for it. Letting down the tyres on his JCB doesn’t have the right feel of accomplishment to it.

Don’t you find direct action quite rewarding sometimes.

Ignore what I said about normal……

Fags huh..?

It’s the very same reason that some of us couldn’t switch from “real” fags to roll-ups and the same reason why, if you analyse your daily consumption, our fag smoking schedule bears little relationship to how long it was since our previous smoke. It’s the same reason you can quit smoking instantly and the same reason you can’t get lab rats hooked on nicotine. It's the reason muttered in hushed tones.
Smoking is simply a compulsive habit. We smoke when we’re happy, when we’re sad, when we’re bored, hungry, lost, hurt, driving, nervous etc etc We fill the little gaps in our lives with a fag and yes, we even smoke when nicotine levels fall in our body. Many want you to think that falling nicotine levels are the sole reason we smoke, that you're addicted to "the most addictive drug ever put on the planet" and "quitting is hard" and then make loads and loads of cash out of that very assumption.
As so many have easily proven, ditch the fags and within a week your nicotine dependency has gone. On a scale of 100, blame 5% of your habit on the nicotine and the rest on your subconscious.
What is disgusting in the extreme is that many people fail in their well-intended quits because they misguidedly put their faith in a solution doomed from the start and don’t take the time to learn about why they smoked. They address the 5% and then find they still want to smoke….Society has trouble accepting the responsibility and needs an addiction excuse whether it’s chocolate, gambling, smoking, weight gain, etc
Those that recognise it for what it is just stop and then kick themselves for being so stupid for so long.
There is no dark side to smoking. No secret, no clever way round it. You stop, suffer a weekend of feeling niggled, a week or two of flu like feelings and then a weird feeling like something's missing out of your life for a few months as you get to grips with thinking you should be doing something else and it turns out it's the smoking you're missing. But in a nice way.......but, while all this is happening you suddenly feel more alive, more alert, less stressed, even happier.......unfortunately preaching comes a little too easy.....

Nicotine Addiction My Arse....

Anyway, the second thing was a link to ASHWales and then a link to the new Cardiff University website where “researchers” (in reality, complete bastards) have put together a fabulous new website giving you all the informed choices of how to quit. Here’s the link if you want to waste their time, http://www.informedhealthchoice.com/quitex/ If you can be bothered signing up and filling in their questions you get the same sad old rubbish that suggests the sooner you light your first fag of the day the bigger nicotine patch you’re gonna need to have even the slightest chance of quitting, oh, and don’t forget to set a date, tell all your friends, throw away all you smoking stuff, write a quit plan and brace yourself.

..and what’s worse this is all OUR fault.

If we just stopped for a minute and listened to ourselves, our smoking habit, our smoking history then we’d suddenly realize the truth behind our reasons for smoking. Every patch, lozenge, inhalator etc that’s bought indirectly funds these very websites to perpetuate the myth of nicotine addiction and to persuade the naïve smoker that they need NRT.

It’s an uphill struggle but one day the truth will prevail…

Fight or Flight..?

This might help....If you take nicotine into the body in tiny amounts - like through smoking, or sticking a nicotine patch on - it will make your heart beat faster than it should, which is both useless and dangerous. It will reduce blood flow to the skin and the extremities, which is bad for your circulation, and the combination of these two changes will raise your blood pressure. Obviously, this does not help anyone calm down at times of stress, when heart-rate and blood pressure are already climbing. Instead it makes a sudden heart attack or stroke more likely.
Nicotine also raises fat levels in your blood which is not only useless but also leads to clogged arteries, heart attacks and strokes. As if that were not enough, nicotine also inhibits the production of an enzyme in the body which normally breaks up blood clots, directly causing a higher incidence of thrombosis and strokes in smokers.
If you take nicotine into the body in any more than tiny amounts it will kill you stone dead because it is a very deadly poison indeed.

That's quite shocking...??

It's just a habit..

I’m quite happy for people to smoke as long as they don’t smoke near me.
I advise smokers I know how to quit at every opportunity without preaching too much.
I’m upset that our own dear NHS has the wrong approach to helping people quit.
I despise the NRT industry for perpetuating the myth and encouraging people to persist with their habit.
Sometimes I feel like I’m Henry Fonda in “12 Angry Men” trying to change the opinion of the nation 1 person at a time.