PART TWO Shock Treatment

Smoker's Lung

Healthy Lung

Shock treatment doesn't work. You could show me all the photos in the world of a smoker's lungs, all the videos you want of people dying from lung disease (pick one) or introduce me to all the folks that have ever been hooked up to an oxygen tank only to be able breathe.

This doesn't work on smokers. A junkie hangs out with other junkies. He sees what the other look like: skinny, deprived, pathetic. The junkie doesn't care because all he can think about is his next fix.

I also don't believe that shock campaigns work on the non-smokers. I saw the same commercials as a teenager. I think everyone's favorite was the man who cracked an egg over a frying pan and stated, "This is your brain on drugs".

Of course ask anyone from the eighties who took that to heart and didn't try pot, pills, acid or cocaine. I never tried those things, but I did try a cigarette.

After the tobacco companies were sued by what seemed like an endless amount of class action lawsuits by people who'd contracted lung cancer, throat cancer, emphysema....well the list goes on. Anyway, the government ordered Phillip Morris, maker of Marlboro and other such "fine" products to begin splattering anti-smoking all over the TV. What we got were commercials with young people running all over town with black body bags and this:

THE SUNNY SIDE OF TRUTH I apologize--I'll work on getting another vid. This was the Truth ad where people danced and sang with dancing & singing cartoon characters about not smoking. Laughable, unnessary, and ineffective.

Is any of this really going to help keep anyone from smoking? It didn't for me. Many big wigs in the tobacco industry stated, under oath, that they believed tobacco is not addictive.

Really? Then why did I slowly go from 2 cigarettes a day to three packs (60 cigarettes)? And why can't I stop? I do not need it to survive. It does not benefit me or my body in any way. To say that tobacco or nicotine is not addictive is to say that heroin is safe.

If that were the case, why then is tobacco legal in our country--or pretty much any country I think of.

Put simply, too many people are making too much money from it. Even after the old timers repeatedly tried to quit, after many quit smoking successfully, there's a new smoker born every day. Even our government is making money from taxes on cigarettes. Think of, even doctors have bonified job security if there are smokers around.

The drug companies create nicotine replacement therapies, the government charges tax on those items, taxes on many early funeral items....

I'm not blaming our government, nor even the tobacco farmers, or the Phillip Morris Companies of this world. I had all the information, all the shock treatment and I made a personal decision to begin smoking.

And I've been hating myself for it for twelve years.

Why did I start smoking then, if I had all the information? I think it was a combination of things:

1. It is legal to purchase and use the drug in public.

2. I had at the time, four smokers living in my home--it was ridiculously easy to obtain & hide the smell.

3. I had not thought of it as a "real" drug.

Really, this is true. These days I will go as far as to say that smoking is WORSE than heroin, much worse indeed. When I was fifteen, I would never have dreamed of snorting a power into my nose or sticking a needle into my arm. Ever! Those are the scary drugs, the kind that turn people into pathetic monsters who would steal from their own mothers!

I'd not yet heard of smoking being compared to heroin.

Sure, I can drive while under the influence of smoking--it certainly doesn't make me high or take me out of my head, but the effects take that much longer to be felt. The effects of the drug on the physical body are invisible for a very long time in a smoker's life.

When the effects are finally felt, you are lain in a hospital bed and made as comfortable as possible; a preparation for the inevitable. We regard heroin as a scary drug because it might not take 30 years, certainly not 50 years, for the junkie to be found dead on a sidewalk. That might sound a little extreme, but tell me: What's the difference?

And do not take for granted that smokers are not in torment because they are considered as bad a heroin junkie. We are as bad. We are junkies because we cannot stop. In today's American society, smoking has been banned in many public places. A non-smoker wouldn't dare allow a cigarette to be lit inside their home and rightly so, the cigarette machines have long since been removed from the hospitals (remember those?)

Every time a smoker cannot be allowed to smoke, the only thing in our heads is, "How soon will I be able to smoke?" Most of the time, it is the ONLY thing we can think about and we envy non-smokers for they do not suffer this torture.

Allen Carr describes in his book The Easy Way to Quit Smoking that we are often able to easily deal with these non-smoking situations, so why it that we cannot simply put down the cigarettes and walk away forever? That question is answered simply: IT IS AN ADDICTIVE DRUG

I hate being a smoker. I hate it. I stink; everything I own stinks. I have chest pains at the age of 27. My heart flutters. I feel sick when I think that I've spent $20,000 on smoking--that's almost half the cost of our mortgage!

Because I smoke, I'm always stressed, never fully relaxed. My fingers and teeth are yellow; my tongue is brown. My insurance premium is higher than that of a non-smoker. I have almost completely lost my sense of taste and smell at the age of 27. I have a short endurance level. I lose my breath easily--much more quickly than any healthy 27 year old should. I heal slowly, get sicker more often and stay sick longer.

And when I cannot have a smoke, I panic.

How does that NOT make me a junkie?