I smoked cigarettes for most of my adult life. I started messing around with them in my teens and at some point I got hooked. I never intended to become a smoker the first time I lit up a Benson & Hedges Menthol King, but then I never intended to do a lot of things that I ended up doing.

Intended or not, I was a smoker for twenty years. By smoker, I mean smoker. I defined myself by my vice, I took pride in what was essentially slow self-destruction. I smoked in the morning, I smoked in bed. I smoked at work, I smoked at home. I smoked with smokers, I smoked with non-smokers. But above all, I smoked.

That’s not to say that I was happy about it.

I tried to quit and failed for years and years. But nicotine is an insidious drug and one that I found impossible to quit. I’d have a week here or a couple of months there, but before too long I would cave and be shelling out hard earned cash on a pack of smokes.

Then at the beginning of 2007, Dr. O’C got pregnant with Boy Z. And everything changed. If I were a psychologist, I would guess that there is some part of every smoker that is attracted to the danger of it – that is subject to that primal death wish. With the prospect of a baby on the horizon, the thrill of flirting with death vanished.

And along with it my obsession with nicotine.

But the novelty and the excitement around my first born son started to fade after several months, replaced by the stress of raising a child. We made another transcontinental move. Our living situation became more difficult. I was spending more time around smokers than usual. I started working one job, then a second. Life happened.

At some point, about eighteen months after I had quit, nicotine crept its way back into my mind.

It started with a bummed cigarette at a party. Then, a couple of weeks later, a cheeky fag with my lab tech. A few days later, I joined our receptionist for a back alley smoke and one for the road. A sly puff with one of my students the next day and before I knew it, I was hooked again. I didn’t admit it to myself or to anyone else, but I was a smoker again.

I was amazed, though I shouldn’t have been, how quickly I got hooked again. I didn’t want to be a smoker and I thought, every time I lit up, that I would sort it out. After this one.

Dr. O’C fell pregnant again and I kept on smoking. I kept on smoking in the face of all the knowledge I’ve got about just what it does to your body. I kept on smoking knowing that, statistically, children of smokers are more likely to be smokers themselves.

When we went into see the midwife at the hospital in which Dr. O’C will give birth she asked Dr. O’C whether or not she smoked, which she doesn’t (and never has, as she will happily tell you). Then she turned her attention to me. There was something in those two sets of eyes – Dr. O’C’s and the midwife’s – that made me realize it was time to get it together.

There’s a relatively new anti-smoking drug on the market called Champix (Chantix in the US)*. It acts by blocking the nicotine receptors in the brain, effectively taking the ‘pleasure’ out of smoking. It has proven more successful as a smoking cessation therapy than the common alternatives and the Australian government is offering it on their Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – a subsidized prescription drug program.

There are about a million reasons to quit and exactly none to keep smoking.

I start the Champix tomorrow and have a quit date of next Sunday.

Wish me luck.

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k.d. lang’s album full of smoking related covers “Drag” was the soundtrack of my first successful quit attempt and I’m hoping that it serves as well this time around. Buy “Drag” from Amazon.

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Image credits:

Marlboro ad

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*There are some reports of pretty severe neuropsychiatric effects of Champix treatment in the popular press. As a scientist, I know that the press loves to latch on to a rare melodramatic drug reaction story and run with it. The statistics don’t support any genuine link between Champix and  adverse psychological effects. It’s still a little spooky.

 
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